The Unseen University

Top Down Design/Bottom up implementation

2012-01-14T13:55:00.000-08:00

In my previous blog i made a case for management as a service profession. And that is something I really believe.

Like any good idea, however, it can be taken to bad extremes. In this post I thought I'd address that.

In traditional procedural programming, we have a concept of "top down design/bottom up implementation." What this means is that you start at the general goal and break it done into sub-tasks. You then break each of those sub-tasks up, and keep going until you hit a level that "feels right" for implementation. (There really is no hard and fast rule for what this is, knowing it when you hit it is more art then science.) Then we start building the software starting at that bottom level and working our way back up to the goal.

This results in a software design that is well focused on the goal, but also is built in clear and separable layers. Top down design is a matter of designing software functionality and interfaces to that functionality. In today's object oriented world it can be seen as a form of "encapsulation' but it is a very specific form that leads to software with some very good properties. Should any individual layer prove to have an issue it can be fixed or replaced with no impact on the layers above it and below it. Higher layers can be stripped away without sacrificing lower level functionality. Finally, each layer can be created by people with the best understanding of that layers' functionality.

An engineering project can be, and I will argue, should be designed in the same way. At the top are those defining the business goals. Beneath them on the tree are one or more layers of architect who take the output of the management layer above them and decompose it into goals for the layer below them until the decomposed parts of the design finally arrive at the implementing teams.

Such layered project design has all the advantages of layered software design. Failures on part of the process do not directly impact other parts of the process below them and impact above them only so far as the architected interfaces need to change. It also focuses each participant's efforts on the area where they add the most value to the project.

In my previous blog I talked about the management side of an engineering manager's job, but many people managing engineers are also engineers or architects themselves. And this calls for a different set of skills and approaches then the management side.

Non-engineering management can often get confused and think that "empowering the workers" means asking every engineer's opinion on everything. Or worse, asking everyone's opinion on every functional part of the process from engineering to art to game design.

This devalues the very expertise you probably hired these people for to begin with and creates a whole lot of confusing noise for upper management. In such an environment, decisions become highly politicized and those who can "sell"(1) what they want in terms that make the most sense to those who often know the least-- upper management-- prevail in defining the entire project.

Part of empowerment is authority. And if you give everyone equal authority over everything, then noone has authority over anything. A football team where everyone is trying to play quarterback doesn't get very far down the field.

So, empower your people... but empower them to do *their* jobs, not everyone else's. Trust that you have hired the right people for the right positions and let them play them without undo interference from others with other functions. That is true empowerment.

(1) Engineers have a technical term for the act of sales. We call it lying. I have *no* tolerance for engineers who deliberately color the information they are passing up in order to get a desired reaction and, if i am allowed to, will fire anyone I catch doing it. That is the flip side of giving some one authority and your trust. If they violate it, they are gone. The kind of management i do calls for honest and open communication, not political positioning.

How to effectively manage professionals

2012-01-14T10:13:00.000-08:00

Looking around for my next gig has made me really think about how I manage professionals and why. If you haven't seen this TED talk, and you manage professionals, you should.

http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html

On top of Dan's excellent anaylsis, let me add a few observations from a good deal of experience on both sides of the management fence:

(1) If you have a system, and its getting lousy compliance, the problem is *the system* not the employees.

(2) If you have a problem employee, 90% of the time what you really have is a mis-match of employee to situation. It is far less wasteful and generally more productive to try to fix the situation then to try to "fix" the employee.

Both one and two above are based on a simple and true premise. Its one Dan talks about in his work. Its that people are intrinsically motivated. Most people really want to do a good job. Rather then the typical management view of "if someone isn't doing a good job then they don't care enough", I propose that 90% of the time if someone isn't doing a good job its because something is in their way and they are at least as frustrated by it as you are.

This leads to my third observation:

(3) Self-organization is the most powerful solution to (2) in your arsenal.

I have seen this over and over. If I try to over-structure a team, I make mistakes. People struggle with the roles I have assigned them. Some do well, some not so well. This is not surprising. After all, all I really know about them is a resume and some short conversations.

HOWEVER they get to know each other very well very quickly. They spend 8 hours a day problem solving together. Left to their own devices they inevitably come up with better solutions as to who is suited to what then I could. Furthermore, their solutions are fluid and can change to meet changing requirements.

Which leads me to my most important point....

(4) The single most detrimental thing to professional productivity, is too much management.

Its wasteful in that it requires a lot of management time, and its wasteful in that generally all you are doing is getting in the way of your people. When I have a team spun up and functioning, that team takes half an hour a day to manage, and (depending on its seniority) 5 to 10 hours a week to coach. Thats it.

If you think every team needs its own manager, you are doing way too much management. 9 women cannot make a baby in 1 month, and 9 managers can't make a baby at all! In fact, put even one "manager" in the room full time directing and grading a couple trying to make a baby and its the rare couple that can manage to achieve the goal.

The old school of management suggested that the best motivators were fear and greed. As Dan points out, that works great for assembly workers, but not for professionals.

The best motivators for professionals are autonomy and trust. The *first* job of a manager of professionals is not to manage the workers, but to manage their environment such that they can work effectively.

This isn't to say that a team should not be directed, but the most effective direction is in the form of engineering goals to accomplish not ways to accomplish them. A team that feels empowered will come to you, in most cases, if they are unsure of how to proceed. And such "event driven" management is far more efficient for both sides then "polling."

For the cases where they don't realize they are headed into trouble, thats what monitoring is for... but that monitoring should always be a light touch. A peek over the shoulder of a mentor, not the drumbeat of a task master.

In my case, I use a white-board based scrum burn-down chart and it takes 10 min or less at the end of the day to discuss and update it. The goal is not to grade them on productivity, but simply to know what is getting in their way and to adjust estimates as we understand more about the problem at hand.

The modern manager needs to serve the company's greater goals by serving his employees needs for both direction and an environment in which they can do their best work. And a manager with time on his or her hands is a manager who has succeeded in those goals. A constantly busy manager, on the other hand, is one who is floundering.

In short, modern effective management is not a position of mastery, but of service. And true service means doing just what is helpful, and then getting out of the way.

My wife, the theologian, would say someone told us this 2000 years ago. Its time we listened.

For those with no memory....

2011-08-02T08:33:00.000-07:00

I get really annoyed when people start mouthing myths as facts, particularly when they fly *against* all actual facts.

That the current deficit is somehow due to the democratic party or their priorities is simply and obviously not true to anyone who actually looks at the facts:

Fact: We had a national budget surplus when Bill Clinton left office.

Fact: The current debt is *entirely* due to George W Bush fighting two wars on credit.

If you don't believe me, look it up in any honest and unbiased source for historical news.

Business, F2P, MMORPGs and basic math

2011-07-15T10:44:00.000-07:00

My past two columns have been digging into Zynga numbers from their S1 statement to see what we can learn about the real F2P business. Today, I'm going to do some basic math with the, Don't worry, its nothing worse the multiplication, division, addition and subtraction. just those simple tools can generate some very interesting results.

The big squawk in the MMORPG space right now is about MMORPGs turning to F2P/Micro-transaction models. Its being hailed as some great new trend, but I've always maintained that the economics were fairly clear. That this isn't a viable way to make money in this space. Why then do it? Because, I contend, in all these cases you have failed MMORPGs with sunk costs to recover and some income is better then none.

With the hard Zynga data, we can explore this topic a little bit better.

Two columns ago, I dug out of Zynga's numbers a clear data point-- that Zynga grossed $3.21 per year per active account in 2010; Last column, with a bit deeper analysis, I concluded that they see a raw margin over operating expenses of about 20%. This means a net before marketing and such of about $0.64 per active account.

So, lets make a few assumptions:
(1) Zynga is the master at this and represents a best-case long term return (a fairly reasonable assumption i think.)

(2) Your MMORPG costs $40M to develop. (Age of Conan was $40m as per http://forums.ageofconan.com/showthread.php?t=149585&page=3, Wow cost $68M to develop http://www.raphkoster.com/2006/06/13/what-wow-cost/. So that seems conservative.)

(3) Your MMORPG has a life-span of 5 years and maintains peak usership for all 5 years. (A very generous assumption.)

(4) Your MMORPG has no more cost of operation then Zynga's casual games and can reach the same profit margin. ( A very very generous and almost certainly false assumption.)

In this perfect storm, how many users does it take til you break even?

Well 20% of $3.21 is about $0.64 a year per active account. Over 5 years thats $3.21 again for the 5 years (not surprising, 5 is 20% of 100).

$40M/3.21 = 12,461,059

SO to even make back your investment in this model, you need to sustain an active user base of almost 12.5 million users over 5 years.

Seen many MMORPGs do that recently? WoW only has 11.4M current subscribers, took years to get to that point, and spent a lot of money on marketing in the process that isn't accounted for in the above overly-generous model.

Real F2P MMORPGs are sometimes a desperate way to get some revenue out of a failed product with sunk costs. But as a way to even break even its a fantasy, not a business model.

More Zynga Analysis - Profit margin

2011-07-09T13:51:00.000-07:00

One of the unanswered questions for a long time has been "how much money does Zynga actually make?" They have been happy to release gross figures, but not net. What is their actual profit margin. A friend of mine used to joke "We lose $10.00 on every sale but we make it up in volume!" Obviously, it doesn't matter HOW much money comes in the door if it costs you more then you are taking in to get it.

This is particularly highlighted by the revelation of my last blog. Zynga is taking in about $3.00 per active user account per year. Now, the economics of online help here a little. Your operational costs are mostly based on concurrently connected users, or CCU. Each concurrently connected user has a cost associated with supporting that user's online session. So its really the return per CCU that matters in your final economics.

It is a rule of online entertainment that your peak CCU is 5% to 10% of your total active user population. So, lets be generous and multiply Zynga's $3.21/yr/active account by 20. That gives an actual income of $60/peak CCU/year or $5.00 per peak CCU/month.

Thats *not* a lot of money to runa service on. A $5.00 per month subscription MMO generates $100/peak ccu/month by the same math. a $15.00 one generates $300 per peak CCU/mo. So, how much of that $5.00 a month is beign spent to get support that user? What is left is what is called the "margin", and thats where your profit comes from.

We can get a rough guess from this, more complicated chart from the S1:

In particular we are interested in this line, gross revenue:

And this line, which is profit after operating expenses:

What we can see from these charts is that, in 2010, Zynga took in $597,495K or just about $597.5M.
Not bad, but what was left after expenses? from the second line we see that, before taxes, it was $127,059K or about $127M.

From that, we can compute a rough margin, using the formula margin% = 100*net/gross. Thus Zynga had a profit margin in 2010 % of about 100*127/597.5 = 21%. Thats not a great margin, but its not razor slim either. As long as they can hold their costs even they aren't in a bad place.

And there is the rub. Because entertainment that stays the same bores its audience and dies. Every other platform and niche in game playing has seen a fairly rapid escalation of complexity and cost in games. The casual space is not likely to be any different. So, can Zynga meet the future challenges it faces on $5/ccu/month? Its a good question. if i had the answer I'd be making a lot more money then I do now (which isn't too shabby as it is.) One thing is for sure, you cant run a game as complex as a modern MMORPG on that. Not without drastic compromises in security.

Another interesting thing emerges from the Zynga documents however, which is that in 2009, with $127M of income, they actually *lost* money. Now a lot of that may be attributable to marketing spends to get themselves to their current $600M of revenue. But if 2010 is benefitting from last 2009's deficit, it calls into questions how sustainable the current margin really is.

No easy answers, but an interesting read. One thing is for sure-- this is not a financial model that supports server-heavy game designs. Unfortunately, those server heavy designs are also the only way to make complex games secure.

All in all I suspect it will be an interesting future for Zynga.

Real Zynga Numbers

2011-07-07T17:42:00.000-07:00

There has been much speculation about Zynga's numbers over the past few years. They gave out tantalizing tidbits but never enough to really know what they were making. As the acknowledged leaders of the F2P space, this is important information and, in the absence of real information, speculation ran wild.

However, in order to make a public offering, you have to "lift the skirts" as they say and so, buried deep in Zynga S1 filing with the SEC are these interesting tidbits:

This is a chart showing Zynga's gross income. The magic bar is the darker blue "revenue" bar as thats the actual money they took in.

This by itself is not much news, but when combined with this next chart, also in the document, it starts to paint a picture:

Looking at a total 2010 income of $698M and an average DAU of 217M, thats about $3.20 per active user account per year.

Honestly, thats better then I thought, though obviously a lot less then the $60 - $180 per account per year a subscription MMO returns.

AARP under right wing attack

2011-06-28T10:48:00.000-07:00

The AARP, traditionally a strong supporter of medicare and social security and a pain in the ass to conservatives wishing to cripple or eliminate these programs, is currently under the same kind of low-political and propaganda attack we just recently saw leveled at PBS.

If you appreciate the AARP but are under 50 years of age, you might want to show support now by becoming an associate member for $12.50.

As a little fore-warned is fore-armed reading, the right is quoting this article BADLY out of context and in very misleading ways. if you think you might have to discuss it with someone, its worth reading in its entirety...

Just because you say it often, doesn't make it true....

2011-06-20T18:33:00.000-07:00

One of the most common of logical fallacies in modern society is the Availability Heuristic. This is the tendency in the human mind to believe most strongly that which is most available in memory. This biases us towards decisions based on the most recent experiences, and the easiest ones to remember.

Its not an unreasonable bias to be built into us as animals. The most recent experiences have the greatest likelihood of pertaining to where we are right now. Furthermore, repetition increases memory and the speed at which memory is recovered, and this too is reasonable. If something happend 10 times recently its a lot more likely to be relevant then something that happened just once.

Generalities are also easier to remember then specifics. It can be argued that this too at one point in time was adaptive in that we are unlikely to encounter the exact same situation twice but we might well encounter many that have important things in common.

Unfortunately, today we live in a finely crafted soup of experience designed specifically to drive our decision making in directions those who pay for the soup want us to go. From all of the above comes a very simple and well known advertising maxim: the more times people hear your message from apparently different sources, and the simpler that message is, the more likely they are to base their decisions upon it.

The Bush administration raised this to a fine art in the political arena by coordinating many right wing radio and talk show hosts around daily messages. Each day they would send all these people a short list of bullet point "messages of the day' to tell their listeners, with the Fox news network at the center driving it home. (http://www.opednews.com/wade_071604_outfoxed2.htm)

A less directly coordinated, but no less insidious, effort has existed since the 1970s and has continued to exert its influence to day. (An examination of its approach to Welfare as an issue can be read here: http://www.publiceye.org/welfare/Decades-of-Distortion.html)

To me, one of the most insidious distortions that has been created through continued repetition of a falsehood is the idea that this is a "Christian Nation."

Nothing could be further from the actual truth. This nation was founded by expatriates from Europe, a place of legitimate Christian nations-- which is to say nations whose Kings claimed their right to rule on Christian religious precepts and which defined Christianity as their state religion.

In stark contrast, our founding fathers did *not* by and large identify themselves as Christians, but rather were part of a movement that has come to be called "enlightenment deism" by theologians and historical scholars. This was founded in the notion that god was represented in the natural order and could be found there, and not in institutions and religions created and run by men. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deism)

They enshrined that belief in one of the most amazing and daring propositions of their day: that *all* men were created equal by their maker, and that freedom of religion was an individual right that should be held totally separate from the matters of governance. By doing so, they were declaring war not just on England, but on all the European notions of state religion.

This is NOT a Christian nation, nor has it ever been one. This is a nation that exists independent of any religion. That it happened to be majoritively occupied by Christians, at its founding or today, was not a reason to make that the state religion.

That was what our founders thought. Thats what the constitution says. And if you didn't know that, maybe you should read it again.

Non-news and real-news in the industry.

2011-06-17T18:32:00.000-07:00

In the non-news category we have this totally incorrect but sure to be talked about blog....

http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/15/facebook-project-spartan/

The idea that this is some kind of end-run of one giant around another is entertaining, but also complete and utter bollocks. Anyone who actually researched and thought about the situation could see that.

Jobs is no fool. There is a reason why Apple allows HTML5 on their
platform but does not allow web Flash content.

HTML 5 is played under the control of the browser, which means they
have total control and can chose to block anything that interferes
with their business. Flash on the web is played by the Flash plugin,
and is under the control of Adobe and *not* apple. The Flash plugin
could be used to load arbitrary third party content onto the iOS
device and there is nothing they could do about it.

Jobs relented as far as allowing Adobe AIR apps because they cannot be
used to load third party content onto the phone and thus are not a
threat to Apple's control.

Microsoft taught the industry that the key to ultimate power is in
the hands of he who controls access to the user. Jobs learned that
lesson well.

Now in the real news department we have this salvo by Microsoft:
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/bott/microsoft-calls-graphics-technology-in-chrome-and-firefox-harmful/3470#comments

Make no mistakes, this is total FUD. The two "independent" reports cited in the article were released on the same day, less then 2 hours apart from each other (the writer acknowledges this correction in the comments below his article.) But it is important because it marks Microsoft's first offensive on a very real battlefield. Microsoft fought long and hard to kill OpenGL on Windows because they could not control it. And they had just about succeeded in getting the entire industry to relent and use the APi they *do* control, D3D.

But the unlikely partnership of Apple and Google have re-opened the entire fight for the desktop with HTML5. And a critical part of this is WebGL. So critical that IE9, while supporting much of HTML5, is conspicuously lacking this feature. This is a battle Microsoft could lose, they are losing market share as is to Chrome. The perception that they lag behind in features could accelerate that loss.
http://www.techspot.com/news/44078-ie-losing-share-firefox-gains-a-bit-chrome-used-by-1-in-8.html

Microsoft is responding true to form. What they don't want to do, they attack with misinformation and fear tactics to scare customers and try to kill the market for. They did this relentlessly with Java. I'm sure they have done it many other times.

Expect their next move to be an "alternative" WebD3D based on the "industry standard" (in the sense that they own the industry currently) Direct3D API for desktop apps.

What happens after that will be up to consumers.

"You are at a cross-roads, you can go east or west."

2011-06-01T18:18:00.000-07:00

We are at a potential cross-roads in online games in the United States, and its important the consumers understand the stakes.

Here's a simple question:

Its a given in a capitalist society that either you run a business to make money or you don't have a business very long.
Therefor in business, the primary motivator for any decision is "how do we make money."

Would you rather the developer of your favorite game's primary motivation be to provide an entertaining game that motivates and keeps subscribers, or a game that motivates you to "buy stuff."?

To put it simply, do you want to be entertained or sold to? Because thats the real choice. Ironically, as an important online developer, I find myself in the position of the salesman today when I really want to be an entertainer.

What do YOU want me to be?

Either way, you the consumer *will* be paying for it or there will be no more games. Your choice of ways to pay makes the difference in what we as developers become.

Yes Virginia, AOC is in trouble

2011-06-01T10:00:00.000-07:00

This month, Age of Conan went to a mixed F2P/Micro-Transaction/Freemium model.

There has been a lot of arguing back and forth as to whether this is some brilliant financial strategy, or a desperate hail mary attempt to keep the game alive.

Unfortunately, all the real data suggests the latter.

Despite the gushing exuberance of Micro-transaction supporters, if you actually push them you will find their statements are based on little to no actual data. This isn't entirely their fault, the industry has purposefully kept meaningful data to itself. The wide-eyed perceptions being much better for business and funding.

As an actual participant in the industry, I've worked pretty hard to get a realistic picture. Based on what reliable information is available, what is said behind closed doors, and my own experiences, this is the picture I've come to:

Fact: Peak concurrently connected users (PCCU) is the metric that drives your operational costs. Thats what you need to support on your back-end.

Fact: F2P games are typically measured in DAU or Daily Active Users. DAU is 2 to 4 times PCCU as a rule.

Industry Knowledge (backed by real experience): Only 3% of your users of an F2P/Micro-transaction game ever spend anything. The result is that an F2P game is considered successful if it generates between $3.00 and $15.00 per DAU per month, which is $6.00 to $60 per PCCU. The vast majority being in that $6.00 to $10.00 range. (Thats successful games, unsuccessful games generate far less.)

Fact: By contrast, subscription games typically generate $5.00 to $15.00 per account. PCCU is reliably 5% to 10% of total accounts. That means a guaranteed income of $50.00 per PCCU on the low end to $300.00 per PCCU on the high end, with the majority actually being in the $150 - $300 range.

Conclusion: Subscription games generate roughly ten times the income per PCCU than do micro-transaction games.

So, how do people like Zynga make money in this market?

The answer is that casual game developers design and build their games to use absolutely *minimal* server resources, and thus support maximal PCCU per box. When we built ZooKingdom our target was 10,000 CCU per server box, and only one server box to support that 10,000 users. With Oregon Trail, we went to 30,000.

So called "hard-core" MMORPGs however are not built this way as a rule.

Instead, they are typically built to handle between 300 and 1,000 CCU per server box and require clusters of boxes to support a single virtual "server".

Summation:

The simple fact is that the economics don't work. The ONLY way it makes economic sense for an MMORPG to go F2P/Micro-transaction is if your subscription sales are so low that you have unused capacity on your servers. In that case, any incremental income you can get for that capacity is worth it.

But for that to be the case, you have to have fundamentally failed first as a subscription game.

Addendum:
The other argument you hear is that players will 'demand" free to play and micro-transactions in the hard-core MMORPG space. Not only is there strong existence proof evidence to the contrary (WoW and DCU just to name two games being very successful right now with subscription pricing), but in fact there is even evidence that the subscription model will play in traditionally casual markets such as mobile.

(See this article for one example of such a success: http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2011-06-01-order-and-chaos-online-makes-USD1m-in-20-days#justposted)

Addendum 2: If you needed any further evidence my call was right...
http://massively.joystiq.com/2011/05/31/age-of-conan-merging-u-s-servers-today-eu-tomorrow/

And the myths keep coming...

2011-05-21T13:37:00.000-07:00

The latest greatest right wing talking-lie is that the Obama administration does not care about our troops.

We could start by asking, "who has worked the hardest in the past dozen years to get them OUT of harms way and bring them home?" And "who has actually funded them with decent equipment to do their jobs." But maybe thats too esoteric.

Instead, here are just a few counter data points on legislation the democratic administration has already passed or is working to pass...

http://www.militaryfamiliesunited.org/releases/mfurelease_012411.html

http://www.goldstarmoms.com/News/Legislation/Legislation.htm

If you ask me, the Republican party and their right wing mouth-pieces owe military families a sincere and heartfelt apology for taking those brave volunteers' grief and hardship and trying to turn it into a political football for their own advantage.

And they owe the American public an apology for the constant stream of manipulative lies they have been telling for about a dozen years now.

As a bumper sticker I recently saw said,"If you aren't outraged, you aren't paying attention."

The Right's New Myth

2011-05-10T15:17:00.001-07:00

During the GWB administration, Carl Rove crafted a network of coordinated and centrally controlled right-wing mouth-pieces that is still alive and well today.

Thus, its no accident that the right's latest attempt to deflect attention from the a fact that the rich are continuing to grab more and more of the american pie hit all over the country at the same time.

Just one example: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Nearly-half-of-US-households-apf-1105567323.html?x=0&.v=1

The implication that somehow, the poor are taking advantage of the rich is absurd and unconscionable.

I'd like all people and corporations with a gross income this year over $100,000 who would like to trade situations with a family whose income was under $30,000 so they can pay no income tax to please form a line to the left... (Never mind that GE, with a gross income of $19bn last year paid no income tax, either.)

Who are the rich and do they need tax breaks?

2011-04-14T19:54:00.001-07:00

In today's america, 1% of the population owns 42% of the wealth. What does that really mean? Well, lets look at some numbers.

There are 311,167,353 Americans today. So 1% of that is 3,111,673 Americans.

At the end of 2010, Americans owned $56.8 trillion in wealth. A trillion is one million million, 42% of that is 23.4 trillion. So if 3 million Americans owned 23.4 trillion dollars of wealth, thats an average of about 8 million a piece. Not bad huh?

So what does that leave for the rest of us? About 33 trillion. For about 308 million Americans. That averages out to about 0.1 million, or 100 thousand dollars.

8 million v. 100 thousand.

Who do YOU think we should tax?? I'll give you a hint... letting those with the most money, those who are getting the most benefit from our society NOT pay taxes is a *great* way to "go broke."

Government through Anarchy

2011-04-11T07:55:00.001-07:00

I remember a time back when all the right wingers were shouting "No negotiating with terrorists."

Well, today they want us to negotiate with terrorists.. and they *are* the terrorists.

The republican party has apparently decided that politics through brinkmanship is the way to their ends. First they held the country hostage to a governmental shutdown, and now they are doing it again with a vote they have never opposed in the past but, if not taken now, will cause the immediate financial collapse of the government.

"These increases to the limit are a yearly occurrence. In fact, many of the Republicans who railed against this bill voted to raise the debt limit by more than $6.4 trillion under President Bush. "

http://www.opencongress.org/articles/view/1499-Senate-Votes-To-Raise-Federal-Debt-Limit

Is it really good politics to try to appease someone just because he is sitting in a room full of gasoline and playing with matches?

Or maybe they aren't actually in the room with us at all. The *true* constituency of the republican party has a lot less to lose by a US financial meltdown then you might think. The richest Americans have been quietly taking their money *out* of our system and investing it in others:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/20/your-money/20wealth.html

Supposedly-American multi-national corporations keep most of their wealth outside the US to avoid US taxes. (See my previous blog on GE paying no taxes. of $14B in revenue last year, $9B of that never saw US shores.)

SO, maybe its not so crazy for them to threaten financial anarchy when all it will really harm are you and me.

But last time I read the document they like to wave in the air more then actually read (the constitution) this wasn't how we were supposed to be governed-- by threat of anarchy.

I'm Changing my name to General Electric

2011-04-04T14:14:00.001-07:00

Back in the 80s, after Chrysler got a huge government hand out to help it stay in business, Tom Paxton wrote the song "I'm changing my name to Chrysler..."

Well, think you are taxxed too much? Then change your name to General Electric.

The marching myth of the neo-right right now is "we need to reduce taxes to encourage employment."

That would be a good trick, since GE who had a $14B year in 2010 paid NO corporate income tax.
http://money.cnn.com/2010/04/16/news/companies/ge_7000_tax_returns/

Exactly how much lower the $0 is necessary to work this miracle?

Maybe if we actually started taxing our richest individuals and corporations, we wouldn't be so "broke" after all...

Debunking American Myths

2011-03-23T09:49:00.000-07:00

I love it when someone shows that a point of common wisdom is total nonsense. In this case, its a bit of common wisdom I've had my own doubts about for a long time... that low taxes and correspondingly low social services are somehow good for small business.

Thats utter bollocks, as INCs recent study of entrepreneurialism in Norway clearly shows.

Norway has some of the highest taxes in the world AND the highest % of entrepreneurs in its population. Why? Because, with all their human needs taken care of by a strongly socialist government, people with an idea have the freedom to explore it without fear of them or their dependents ending up penniless on the street.

Doesn't that make simple, obvious sense, now that you think about it? Not only that but those who are paying the most in taxes are by and large happy to pay them because they see what they are paying for on a daily basis.

More information on the study can be found here...

http://www.inc.com/magazine/20110201/in-norway-start-ups-say-ja-to-socialism.html

High in the clouds

2011-02-25T18:47:00.000-08:00

So... is the world really as stupid as marketers think it is?

I don't believe so. I hope thats not a fatal error. \

An associate recently showed me a press release from a company that was totally devoid of content and asked me what I thought. I asked him "what is it?" He answered "Cloud service for Unity." At which point I simply told him he hadn't answered the question. What does it do? Why do i care? He wasnt able to answer those questions.

And then there is onlive. You can join gamefly or gametap for $8.00 a month OR you can join OnLive and get access to less content thats delivered in poorer quality for $10.00 a month. But Onlive is "in the cloud"! Lets all go "oooooh" together shall we?

Honestly, this cloud nonsense reminds me nothing more then an episode I saw of MSTK3000 where Crow is into EXTREME philately (stamp collecting) because, as he put it, "everything is better when its EXTREEEEEMEEE!"

Apparently todays marketers think you will think everything is better if its "in the cloud."

The question is... do you?

2011-02-06T18:27:00.000-08:00

So.... I liked Kagi more then they liked me. Apparently my ambitions aren't big enough for them as they declined to take me on as a customer.

Ergo, its back to Digital River.

With some more poking around I found out that oen of Digital River's other services also does digital distribution-- RegNow. Its more expensive then the service I was looking at (SWREG), costing me about $1.70 per sale BUT for the convenience of not having to worry about setting up my own distribution server, I can live with that.

Unlike Kagi, they take all comers so being rejected isn't an issue. The only problem I've run into is that RegNow seems to be built solely with software downloads in mind. This wouldn't be a problem except that there is no way to tell their system your product does not fit into a "software category." I've sent them an email asking for more information about that. I'll report back what I find out.

Selling Stuff Cheap 2: Digital Stuff

2011-02-05T17:49:00.001-08:00

I decided I wanted to offer just the DVD for "These Cards Don't Count" as a digitial download for DIY types. There are a lot of advantages to that for me. I dont need to spend money on either a DVD+R blank or building the props myself. I don't have to deal with shipping. And it takes me no time to prepare. All that is worth money, so I figured I could sell the digital version for half off the hard version's price.

Both Google and Pay Pal claim to be able to handle digital merchandise, but when you dig into it all they are really able to handle is selling a code and pointing someone at a URL. All the code creation/verification and download you have to build.

Now, its not that hard to build if you know some PHP BUT that requires a server that allows server-side scripting. Google sites doesn't. Furthermore, it means development time on my part, which is a cost. So i went searching for a no upfront fee digital download service I could use. I found two, Digital River and Kagi. Neither is cheap on fees. For my product its about $1.25 - $1.50 per sale, but with my other costs reduced so far I could afford that. The decider for me was that Digital river still does not host your content for download, while Kagi says they will (for free.)

I am currently awaiting approval of my Kagi merchant account. Then I'll report on how that went....

How to sell stuff cheap

2011-02-04T19:33:00.000-08:00

So, I've started (another) little side business.

I've been involved on and off with Magic since grade school. In high school I was semi-pro, pulling down about $5.00/hour doing street magic at a time when my friends were making $3.25/hr slaving at McDonalds. The hobby sort of dropped off my radar post-college and, while i still carried coins in my pocket and would occasionally do a few tricks when the subject came up, I wasn't really actively pursuing it. About 2 years ago however I started gaming with a very nice fellow named Jeb, who was ALSO a performing magician and I got the old itch back.

Since then I've done a handful of shows and developed a number of my own props and routines as well as become a regular hanger-on at The Magic Cafe, a wonderful online magic forum community. I've been encouraged by friends there to release my most recent little creation for other magicians.

Which is all a long way of getting to the point that I needed a sales presence on the web. This is an inexpensive packet trick however, and its my only product right now, which means from a sane-business perspective I had to watch what I put into marketing it. The magic market isn't huge to begin with and there is no guarantee I'll take even a medium share of it. Accordingly, I had to find inexpensive (eg cheap) ways of doing *everything*-- from making and packaging the product, to selling and shipping it.

Enter Google and Pay Pal. For $10/yr I got the domain catcofx.com and web and email service from google. All that was left was to be able to take and process orders. Both Google and Pay Pal offer payment services that have no set-up or monthly fees, you just pay them their fee for each order processed. They also make it VERY easy to place a "Buy Now" button on your web site.

I started with Pay Pal alone, but discovered one thing missing i needed. Both Pay Pal and Google have their strong points, but the big thing missing from PayPal was the ability to offer "coupons." This was important to me as part of my marketing strategy is to set my price point for retail at a place where I can still make money after distributor mark-down, but then offer my friends at The Magic Cafe a reduced "VIP" price if they ordered directly through me. Google checkout has that feature though, so I am supporting both payment methods on the site.

After a day of researching and set up, the first version of Catco Magical Effects is live on the web at http://www.catcofx.com

Total investment by me, $10.00

New Facebook with SECURODYNE!

2011-01-27T09:21:00.000-08:00

Although it is a well known adage that "noone has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the average american" people have lost more then money by making their disdain for their customers' intelligence apparent.

Today, Facebook released a press release that reeks of such disdain. Facebook PR has been plagued with security issues, both real and imaginary. Their answer? To quote today's announcement:

If you’ve ever done your shopping or banking online, you may have noticed a small “lock” icon appear in your address bar, or that the address bar has turned green. This indicates that your browser is using a secure connection (”HTTPS”) to communicate with the website and ensure that the information you send remains private. Facebook currently uses HTTPS whenever your password is sent to us, but today we’re expanding its usage in order to help keep your data even more secure.

Translation: Either we don't know what HTTPS actually does, or we are hoping desperately that you don't!

HTTPS does not somehow make your account magically secure. It is a very specific remedy to one very specific kind of attack. It prevents third party "man in the middle" attacks. What are these? These are where someone in between you and facebook is snooping the packets of information sent between you and Facebook, and digging information out of them. This has to be either someone on your local network or someone with access to your ISP's routers. It does nothing to prevent programs running on YOUR computer (viruses, key loggers and so on) from extracting such information. It also does nothing to prevent the myriad of other ways people can get your information, including breaking into Facebook's computers themselves.

To my knowledge, although many people have had their facebook accounts hacked and IDs stolen, none have been through such man in the middle attacks. Finally, as they say, they already DO use https for the critical transfer of name and password.

So, today Facebook proudly did nothing of note to make you any more secure.

But they are hoping you don't know enough to know that.

A case of duty

2010-11-02T09:18:00.001-07:00

I often get asked by people I know why I often vote *for* taxes, or vote against reducing them.

I think this election season thats a particularly salient question.

My answer: I feel it is my duty.

To often, we have let the right wing coopt that word and use it when its convenient to their goals and interests only.

Its time to take it back. Here are duties I feel strongly I have to my country and my countrymen:

(1) To support my fellow Americans in their hours of need

Right now we are in tough economic times. Some of us are lucky enough to still have gainful employment and I am among them. I consider it my duty to help those not so fortunate and cutting the taxes that support the social services (as meager as they may be) that form what little safety net they have would be beneath my conscience.

Similarly, to let my fellow Americans die from exposure because they cannot afford shelter, or of disease because they cannot afford proper medical care, is something I again cannot conscience. If we truly are one people, then we owe it to our less fortunate to share some modicum of our good fortune with them, even if its just their basic needs.

(2) To support my country's economic future
We will never again be a manufacturing power. That is a reality of economics. All we have left to bargain with in the world economy is our skilled labor and skilled labor requires learning skills, which means education. I support education and education spending as vital to our country's future and as another duty of being a beneficiary of this country's economy.

(3) To support the American Dream

This country is built on a promise, that someone who wants to work, can work and someone who wants to work hard can be rewarded for that effort with a reasonable standard of living. This can only be true in an economy with an ample place for a middle class. For the past thirty years, the distribution of wealth in this country has been shifting more and more to the wealthy and that wealth has come out of what is available to the middle class.

The right likes to accuse the left of "class warfare" but the fact of the matter is that its a war that both sides have been engaged in for a long time, and the shift of wealth shows who is is winning it and it isn't the working man or woman.

(4) To support a government By the people and For the people.

The sad fact today is that our government is bought and paid for with money spent on advertising (and "news-vertising") that tells lies to the voting public. One look at who is paying for those ads tells you which side is which. The right is funded by large for-profit corporations and very wealthy people. The left is funded by organized groups of working men and women (that's called a "union" by the way), not-for-profit social justice groups, and more and more by middle-class individuals of conscience.

I believe that as is, it is fundamentally unstable and that there is no mistake that the rise of the over-bearing power of the rich coincides directly with the rise of the importance of advertising driven mass media in our society. I believe the system today is fundamentally flawed, distorted past recognition by a media-power our founders could never have anticipated. In the short run, it is my duty to be part of that mobilized shrinking middle class.

In the long run, I believe the system is terribly unstable today and major change is needed to ensure that this government by and for the people does not perish from this earth.

We are headed straight back into aristocracy and I believe it is my duty to fight that.

(5) A duty to create Liberty and Justice for All

The American Dream of the middle class is something we had and have just about lost. This dream, I am afraid, we have never had. The good news is that it is one of the few parts of that grand promise that actually is getting better. We have our first President of Color. We edge closer and closer to equal rights for the LGBT community. Racial distinctions are blurring as our country "browns" through mixed race relations. All this is good.

But it is still true that there are two standards of justice in this country, one for those who can afford the costs of courts and another for those who cannot. It is still true that people of color live in poverty in statistically far greater numbers then those not. And we still have a court system that cares more about convicting somebody, anybody, for a crime then about seeing justice done.

These are fundamental duties of citizenship and success.

These are why I am a progressive and proud of it.

It's a case of duty.

Apple: An iMac is NOT an iPad with a keyboard!

2010-10-25T11:17:00.000-07:00

In a number of moves in the past few weeks Apple has tipped their hands on a new strategy-- they want to turn iMacs into over-sized iPhones.

They are shutting down Java

http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#releasenotes/Java/JavaSnowLeopardUpdate3LeopardUpdate8RN/NewandNoteworthy/NewandNoteworthy.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40010380-CH4-SW1

And Flash

http://www.casualgaming.biz/news/30691/Apple-axes-Flash-from-new-Macs

And launching an online Mac "app" store:

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/20/the-mac-app-store-will-create-competition/

This is a whole lot like Ford selling a lot of pickups and deciding every car has to have a flatbed. What is appropriate for one market (iPhone and iPad mobile computing ) is not necessarily appropriate for another (desktop computing).

But there is no denying that Apple has made a lot of money in their closed iApp market. A LOT of money. Google-like money.

http://mashable.com/2010/10/18/apple-earnings-q4-2010/

So a decision to try to take back total control of their desktop apps is not surprising.

Greedy, stupid, and destined to push them back into single digit market shares.

But not surprising.

Good news for Apple, bad news for Apple users

2010-10-14T09:21:00.000-07:00

Apple has topped 10% of the US market

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/pc-demand-slows-amid-consumer-fatigue-but-apple-share-surges/40416?tag=nl.e539

If you are an Apple user and you aren't running virus protection software, you are officially a fool.

At not just 10% of the market, but a very complacent 10% who are used to believing they are "virus proof" you have become a very viable target.

My Advice: Don't be one of those who learns that the hard way.

Why I don't care about "The Social Network."

2010-10-06T10:03:00.001-07:00

So, the big buzz right now is the Mark Zuckerberg biopic "The Social Network."

Its been called "Citizen Kane for the ADD, I wan't it NOW generation", but I think even thats been overly generous.

The thing is, Citizen Kane, the thinly disguised biopic of Willam Randolf Herst, was about a character who was sympathetic in many ways and who had actually lived a life. While not in all senses a nice man, Kane is a hard working, driven man who we see work and sacrifice to make his way to the top. He puts in a life of determined work in order to reach the pinnacle he does. And the ultimate lesson of the movie, that you can't expect to understand a man or his drives from one or two isolated facts about him, is a deep and meaningful thing to think about.

And then we have Zuckerberg, by all accounts (including this movie) an obnoxious self-obsessed late adolescent. Mr. Zuckerberg, you HAVE no life to write about. You are 26. When Kane is 26 he's still a struggling junior reporter. At 26 he is still far lower on the economic scale than you were at birth. And what this movie says is that your motivations are so thin, juvenile, and simplistic that they can be adequately explained by a handful of life events.

And thats why I don't care about you or your "story".

A spoiled rich kid goes to Harvard, feels like an outsider, and gets rich himself. No big surprise. Money is power and, like Bill Gates, you started out with a lot of it. Power brings power, money brings money. If you had had to work flipping burgers to pay your way through a state school, like many people I know, would you have had the time to create your "brilliant" invention? I bet there are plenty more brilliant inventions out there that could be created by college students without the need to actually pay their way through life.

Your story, such as it is, is pedantic, predictable and maybe just a bit pathetic. The rich get richer. Thats a story I see every day in the news for free.

Get them to make another movie when you have actually lived some life, say maybe when your 70, and maybe I'll go see that.

Preparing to be a third world country

2010-09-24T23:08:00.001-07:00

Lots to rant about this week. Today its going to be about US economic development policy.

As in, we have none.

I have had the opportunity to talk to people from many different countries and governments about startup funding for a new business in the past year or so. Its a software infrastructure project that has the potential to have a major developmental impact on the countries electronic entertainment industry.

Canada, Singapore and Scottland all have programs where they will pay 50% of the salaries of engineers hired in their countries to pursue this project.

Germany and the EU have programs where they will pay for the costs of commercializing university research.

What about the US? The US has the attitude that anything that is useful for industry should be funded solely by industry. In other words, we have no policy of support for the development of our high tech industry in this country. At all.

This is frightening. We have effectively lost all manufacturing in this country. When I was at Sun a common idea floating around was that this was okay because we would always be *the* center of intellectual property and new ideas.

I thought that was hubris then, I think its provably false now. With other countries actively investing in their high tech industries the way we once invested in a space program I am afraid our time at the top of the heap is coming to an abrupt close. Of the three top game consoles today, the only one that was created in the US i the one that doesn't make money. I am referring of course to the XBox360 and the huge sums of money Microsoft has poured into buying the number two console spot.

We have Apple still making innovative product, but that innovation is almost immediately copied and then riffed on by companies in Asia. I wouldn't peg our hopes to that particular horse. Apple's lead is primarily in industrial design, and thats a talent that can be developed anywhere with a little bit of effort. And at still less then 10% of the PC market and a seriously threatened position in mobile computing, they are hardly a drop in the world market bucket. The other 90% of the PC market? Thats already majoratively owned by Korean and Chinese computer makers.

Other signs of our retreat into third world status are the growing gulf between the rich and the poor and the evaporation of the middle class. With every step in that direction we are look less and less like a modern industrialized nation.

They say a laurel wilts the fastest when its sat upon. And we have planted our posteriors smugly upon ours for far too long. Either we snap out of it and remember that a rising tide rises all boats, and a falling one drops them, or we cede our place in the world to countries that need no reminding.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

The Dysfunctional Family of Open Source

2010-09-24T15:40:00.001-07:00

So, I have had the honor this week of working with a set of some of the smartest, most cutting edge game researchers in academia this week putting together a research agenda for the National Science Foundation.

This has given me a chance to immerse myself in a world I normal only touch on the edges, and in the process something has struck me. It is one of many many places I have been where there is an institutional double standard on open source software.

One of my frustrations in life has been how badly we do information transfer in this country. There are all sorts of interesting research projects in our universities that could lead to either interesting one off games or potentially whole new tools or genres. That transfer however seldom happens and the reasons come down to economics. The researchers need funding to do their research. The universities need funding as well. But the game industry isn't like the telephone industry where a few big companies dominate the market and are brimming with money to throw at Universities. Even the biggest game houses are really just large collections of individually accounted for projects, each of which has to make an immediate decision about where dollars for the currently in development game goes. If it doesn't make THIS game cheaper or better NOW, there is no room in the budget for it.

But where is this double standard? The answers is that university researchers *love* free and open source game engines. They find them incredibly useful in doing their jobs. But raise the idea that they should in turn open source their software artifacts and you better duck.

This is not specific to academia. I've seen this double standard over and over. Lots of people use open source software today without any interest in returning the results of that use to community ownership. Big software companies will use open source components freely in their products, but have no interest in giving away the products of their own labors.

But it seems to me a fundamentally dysfunctional relationship. As a socialist revolution, it seems pretty one-sided, opportunistic, and ultimately unsupportable.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

The power of connotations

2010-09-21T13:03:00.000-07:00

Its funny how even intelligent engineers can be easily swayed by the connotations associated with a name.

Periodically, we get asked "why does Darkstar (now RedDwarf) use pessimistic concurrency, wouldn't optimsitic concurrency be better? Optimism is better then pessimism right?"

Well, not necessarily. Unbridled optimism can be a very bad thing. Optimism about the housing market created the economic situation we are all in now. But more to the point, the connotations of the words "optimistic" and "pessimistic" don't really say anything about how the software functions. As it turns out neither is "better" then the other. It depends on what you are trying to optimize, where and when.

To quote wikipedia:

"In the field of relational database management systems, optimistic concurrency control (OCC) is a concurrency control method that assumes that multiple transactions can complete without affecting each other, and that therefore transactions can proceed without locking the data resources that they affect. Before committing, each transaction verifies that no other transaction has modified its data. If the check reveals conflicting modifications, the committing transaction rolls back.^[1]

However, if conflicts happen often, the cost of repeatedly restarting transactions hurts performance significantly; other concurrency control methods have better performance under these conditions."

So called pessimistic concurrency checks for conflicts when an object is first accessed for read or write. If there others out there using the object in a conflicting manner, it can cause the thread to pause while it waits for the other thread to finish its use of that object. In the event that there is such a contention, this is a good thing. It means you don't waste CPU doing calculations based on a 'stale' object and throwing all that work away at the end and having to start all over again. This reduces CPU load. While the blocked thread is waiting, other threads get to use the CPU. The end result is that more users can be processed in parallel with less total CPU usage.

However that check does come with some small cost. In an environment where you are accessing hundreds or thousands of objects in a thread this way, it can add up. Thats where so-called optimistic concurrency comes in. It doesn't take those costs but just acts like the object is always free. It keeps its own copy and, at the end, checks for consistency. If it finds a conflict, it dumps all its investment and starts over. (No government bailout applies.)

SO, which is better? It depends on your expected usage. If you expect a high volume of data accesses to data processing with very little contention, optimistic concurrency makes sense.

In Darkstar/RedDwarf however where we expect maybe a few dozen data access per thread, and where we expect our data processing (game logic) to be of significant cost, its better to be safe (and pessimistic) then sorry.

A one sentence rant

2010-08-30T09:35:00.000-07:00

Letting students use a calculator in math class is like letting them use a boom-box in band.

Another report from the Bureau of Meaningless Statistics

2010-06-11T11:57:00.000-07:00

"80% of all statistics are meaningless. 73% of all statistics are made up." -- Anonymous

The F2P area really abounds in meaningless statistics. This months choice example comes from the president and cheif flogger for Live Gamer via The Edge online:

""We're seeing average revenue per paying user top $28 per month across the 145 titles that Live Gamer powers around the world."

http://www.edge-online.com/news/study-free-to-play-market-to-hit-7-billion-by-2015

Sounds impressive doesn't it? But what exactly does "average revenue per paying user" mean? The answer is, by itself, absolutely nothing. A game with 10 million users where only one spent anything, and he spent $100, would have an "average revenue per paying user" of $100!!

Is that a game to invest in?

I often quote Mark Twain at moments like these:

"There are 3 kinds of lies. Lies, damn lies, and statistics."

The iWeasel

2010-06-11T11:00:00.000-07:00

Well, Apple continues to insert more and more weasel wording into their iPhone developer's agreement. Their latest loop hole to allow them to selectively enforce their rules was added at WWDC to section 3.3.2, the prohibition against interpreted code:

"Notwithstanding the foregoing, with Apple’s prior written consent, an Application may use embedded interpreted code in a limited way if such use is solely for providing minor features or functionality that are consistent with the intended and advertised purpose of the Application."

(http://www.appleoutsider.com/2010/06/10/hello-lua/)

IMHO this latest change was specifically to allow Unity based games, without which they would lose most of their best game content.

The agreement is passing from insulting to outright laughable as Apple squirms and twists to do what they want to without violating their own rules and creating potential legal issues for themselves.

I think the time has come for Apple to issue a "plain language" agreement. I offer the below as my suggestion:

Apple iPhone Developer Agreement Mark 2:

Section 1.1: Restrictions

No application or development tool is allowed that, in our opinion, in anyway competes with our economic interests. These interests include but are not limited to direct sales, ad revenue and total control over any hardware or software running on or attached to our product.

See? I just saved Apple hours of legal fees ;)

Apple trying to force Google out of the iPhone ad business

2010-06-10T08:17:00.000-07:00

Here's an interesting development in the on going saga of Apple's overly restrictive developer policies...

http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=129821

To my mind Apple is flirting dangerously with "restraint of trade" with all these new, very targeted developer restrictions. And Google has the bucks to give Apple a real good fight in court. Especially if, as I suspect is coming, the government gets involved on a federal level.

Edit: My suspicion seems confirmed...

http://www.wirelessweek.com/News/2010/05/Policy-and-Industry-Apple-Developer-Rules-FTC-Legal/

Everyone remember this ad?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYecfV3ubP8

Who knew that the big face on the screen was, in fact, Steve Jobs?

Dear Steve, (an open letter to Apples CEO)

2010-06-03T13:45:00.000-07:00

I love my iPad. Its a wonderful bit of kit. The hardware is top notch and the software smooth and elegant.

I've been a software developer for more then 30 years. I already have an Android app on the market. I will not, however, be developing anything for my iPad. And the reason is your latest restrictive developer rules.

Its is unfathomable to me that you, as the platform maker, feel you have the right to restrict what tools I can use to develop my application. No platform maker has ever demanded such of their developers.

This is like your Chinese assembly plant dictating to you what trucks you could use to carry the resulting product or how you could sell them. Manufacturing is their business, sales is yours.

And software development is *ours.*

Even Microsoft, when they decided they wanted to own the PC compiler market, did it by devious competition and not through direct arm-twisting of their developers. They understood how much they needed their developers. Do you?

This is a dangerous time to be playing such games. Android use is on the rapid rise in cell phones, far out-pacing current iPhone sales and Android pads are about to break into the market. All it will take is one that feels as comfortable to me as my iPad and you will have lost not just a developer but a customer.

Regardless of whether I keep my ipad as a consumer or not however, one thing is certain. Until you retract your ill-considered language and tool mandate, the only way I will be personally developing iPad software is if the iPad version happens to come free as a by product of a tool I am using to reach another market.

And given the fact that your position is now to reject applications created by such tools, this isn't very likely.

Objects Considered Harmful

2010-06-01T19:19:00.000-07:00

Alright,

Its time for a programming vent.

As many of you know, I wrote the "Early Access" version of what would become the Project Darkstar server. When that project transferred to its eventual team in labs, the team there spent well over a year debating and re-creating what I had already created. As I watched this I comforted myself with the belief that this team of specialists would produce a better result each in their own area then I had the time or ability to do, doing it all.

Well, I am now deep in the client/server transport and protocol sections of the code right now... and I have never seen a more overly complex, totally obfuscated mess in my life.

The thing about protocol stacks is, they map beautifully to a simple, proper, structured coding approach. What we used to call top-down design/bottom up implementation. Each layer of the protocol is a layer of structured code with a well defined interface, calling the level below it. PDS (now RedDwarf) has two layers of fundamental abstraction-- a transport that moves packets around and a protocol that interprets them. To be fair and give credit where credit was due, that idea was implicit in my original implementation and the author of the re-write did pull that out as an explicit organization principle and observe that there should be a plug-in interface for each.

That, however, is where my praise of this code ends.. It is an unholy mess of calls and callbacks on passed objects running up and down the stack in higgeldy-piggeldy fashion to the point where so much of the logic is spread out in so many places the total execution is virtually untraceable.

This is not the first time I've seen this in code in recent years. I think the culprits are primarily University professors and CS programs who are so in love with concepts of "Object Oriented" programming that they are failing to teach the basics, which still come down to data structures, interfaces and layers of code. Those of us who WERE taught such concepts recognize an "object" as just a convenient packaging of data structure + interface and continue to write clean, clear encapsulated code.

But it seems the kids these days don't have those clear organizing principles in their heads. As a result they write their code as a whirling cloud of disorganized interacting objects. This chaotic swirl is virtually impossible to statically trace on paper as we had to, instead they count on debuggers to show them run-time behavior and praying that what they saw in this limited sample really represents most if not all possible interactions.

I think its time for a harsh remedy. I am calling for teachers of coding everywhere to rip those

Java and C++ books out of your students hands. Give them C, or if your nice, Pascal, to learn their basics on. Teach them what data structures are and how to do top-down design/bottom up implementation. Take away their debuggers and make them debug with trace calls.

When they can do that with aplomb, they are ready for the objects. But when you put power tools in the hands of someone who has never used a saw or screw-driver, you get messy accidents. And thats what were getting in code today.

Or to paraphrase a common witticism I never agreed with anyway as a statement I CAN agree with...

"There is no problem in Computer science that cannot be totally obfuscated by the addition of too many levels of abstraction."

The soundbyte generation

2010-04-29T11:39:00.000-07:00

I have noticed in the past few years that I am getting more and more flooded by people sending me web-links. Sometimes its just because they find something interesting, often though it seems as if they think I should take it seriously as intellectual discourse.

So its time for my soapbox again:

Forwarding a web link is to intelligent discourse what "Mama, look I found a bug under that rock!" is to biology.

If you are going to cite references and be taken seriously by anyone with any sort of intellectual training, you need to do at least 4 things that are generally never done when people send links around:

Validate the veracity of your source. The most heinous offenders of these are people who send me either press releases or marketing speeches. We used to have a saying at Sun while I was there: the only difference between sales and marketing is that sales *knows* its lying. A source that has something to gain from convincing you what it is saying is true is never, ever a reliable one.
Read the damn article yourself first. I have a friend who just loves to link quote, and more then half the time if you read the article he's quoted fully, it defeats his own argument.
Differentiate statements of fact from statements of opinion. Lots of people believed the world was flat. That didn't make it any more true then if only one person did. Common wisdom is seldom wise and almost always suspect.
Differentiate serious arguments from propaganda. Propaganda is inherently a manipulative form of communication. It is *built* to persuade and not to enlighten. There are standard social and linguistic techniques employed in propaganda, none of which standard up to a serious test of logical correctness.

In a moment of deliberate irony,l I'm going to give you a URL link to the most complete list of the standard fallacies of propaganda I've come across.

Link-wars are, I suppose, the inevitable result of a sound-byte culture. Its argument by sound-byte. And it has just as much depth of thought.

Winners and Losers in Oracle's Sun Picks

2010-04-18T09:43:00.000-07:00

Now that the dust has settled in the Snorcle merger, we can see some of what Oracle has kept and not kept in the Sun portfolio. This is my own set of calls on what were good and bad choices, time will tell if I am right or wrong...

Good Call: Keeping Glassfish 3

There seems to have been little impact on the Glassfish project. It is still open and going strong, Although there have been project management issues in the past (Glassfish2 was buggy and never fixed) in general this is a central enterprise technology in major use. There was some concern that they might suffer from being in competition with Oracle's own database-integrated app server but so far that hasn't seemed to have happened.

Bad Call: Keeping Java FX

Larry, what are you thinking??

The final and ultimate shot in Sun's pointless and already lost battle with Action Script. This is a whole lot like Japan deciding to invest half its GNP in a war effort *after* the bomb fell on Hiroshima. A huge expensive boondoggle that no one but Sun cares about. Even if Sun *could* win this war (which they can't), the entire future of the segment is now under *serious* threat from Apple and Google with HTML5, which basically makes both AS3 AND JavaFX unnecessary.

Good Call: Keeping Sun Labs

Sun Labs is where most of Sun's strength has emanated from. A highly efficient group, they get more done with less man-power then most of Sun.

Bad Call: Screwing with Sun Labs Portfolio

Look at it this way, Larry. Suppose some hairy engineer today had an idea for a brand new, never seen before, language on top of a brand new, never seen before operating environment that he wanted to write for a tiny-device market that didn't exist yet.

What would you say in portfolio review?

That, my friend, was Oak, which later became Java, which you paid HOW much to own???

Think about it.

Bad Call: Screwing with the Sun Culture

I have my ear to the Sun grapevine. You are leaking top talent right now like a rowboat made out of pumice. Why? Because if Sun people wanted to work in an Oracle environment they would've joined Oracle to begin with, not Sun. In case you haven't read yesterdays WSJ, the tech sector is in major hiring mode again. They have lots of options and they are taking them. I suspect you will find them very hard to replace.

Surprise Good Call: Keeping Netbeans

Honestly, I'm on the fence on this one. Two years ago I would've said Eclipse had it beaten dead rights and you should just port whats of value from Netebans to Eclispe plugins and kill it. But Eclipse seems to be running out of steam, weighed down by its own success and a panoply if increasingly incompatible plugins. Meanwhile, Neteabs 6.8 has managed to leapfrog Eclipse to be the better dev environment. It has better support for the most modern language trends and is easier to keep functioning.

Kudos to the Netbeans guys, in any event, for a surprising last-lap come-back.

Good Last Minute Decision Reversal: Keeping Kenai

In a clear last minute reversal of policy, Oracle reversed its position on Sun's competing open source environments, saying they would keep the java.net name but migrate to the Kenai backend.

Good call. OReily's software that Java.net runs on has always been a weak player in the field and Java.net's greatest weakness. Kenai is a modern hosting site well-integrated with Netbeans. mering the Java.net brand and exisiting project base with Kenai's technology is a best-of-both-worlds solution.

Worst Call of All: Buying Sun

I blame this more on the Sun board then on Larry Ellison, honestly. Sun is just not a good culture fit for Oracle and Oracle hasn't learned the IBM lesson that, when you buy a company you are also buying the culture so don't mess with it any more then absolutely necessary.

IBM was a far better culture fit. In the end, the Sun board had a chance with IBM to save all that was good about Sun and threw it away or the sake of 50 cents more a share.

Prediction:

When the dust settles in a few years, oracle will find all they bought was a few by then aging technologies and an aging brand. What was truly valuable about Sun, the holders of future-vision, will have all drifted off to other opportunities.

Just got my IPad

2010-04-12T10:19:00.000-07:00

Quickie review

Pros:

great form factor, about the same size as my Clio was. (The Clio was fantastic, well ahead of its time hardware, crippled by crappy microsoft abandoned software.)

Handles books very very well, including PDFs. A nice surprise is that there is a free Amazon reader for it so I can get all my Kindle books on it, too. IBooks + Amazon Kindle + the free Good reader app for PDFs makes a pretty darn complete reading solution.

Video playback is superb... but ti only natively supports MP4 so you'll have to do some laborious converting of other formats to play them from memory. When done however it does a beautifuol job.

Cons:

Doesn't multi-task. I didn't realize how much id miss this, but it means that, although Pandora is available for the machine, I can't listen to Pandora and read a book at the same time :(

The only exception is their own Ipod app which *will* run in background... figures, huh?

Screen smudging. I tend to have oily hands. I'm going to be wiping this thing down pretty often. That it didn't come with a wiping cloth is mildly annoying.

App limits. Where there are apps, its great, but where there arent, life sucks. I cant play Hulu for instance on this device because Apple hates Flash and wants everyone to use HTML 5 instead. While I appreciate the sentiment, unless/until the world DOES go all HTML5 this will be a real limit on the Ipad's usefulness.

Edit: Discovered one more plus/minus over an ebook reader. Plus, it looks great in the dark. Minus, its pretty much unreadable in direct sunlight.

More Lies, damn lies, and statistics

2010-03-18T07:21:00.001-07:00

Nothing is more meaningless or misleading then a statistic without context.

For instance, take this one:

Virtual Products & Goods Sales Reach $5 Billion in China vs $1 Billion in US in 2009

This article goes on to blather about micro-transactions and virtual object sales as a primary monetization model. But the link between these two ideas is never really established or demonstrated.Consider THIS statistic in light of the one above...

Over One Million Gold Farmers In China

So, how much of that 5 billion dollars above is in fact being driven not by F2P/virtual object transactions at all, but by the sale of gold coming out of traditional MMORPGs? And not actually being sold to Chinese but, in fact, to the west?

Based on the numbers above I'd hazard to guess a lot.

Emperors new clothes and suits made of suede

2010-03-15T20:27:00.001-07:00

On numerous occasions I've heard it claimed that Free to Play (F2P) games are generating Average Returns Per User (ARPU) per month in the double digits.

I've always doubted these claims. They make no sense. Its well known that less then 5% of the users of these games pay *anything* at all. In order to return a monthly ARPU of even $10, this means that the average spend of those who DO spend money must be at least $200 a month.

How many people do YOU know that spend $200 a month, month after month, on micro-transactions? The very idea boggles the mind.

Where then did these inflated values come from? I found the answer in this article.

"http://lsvp.wordpress.com/2008/06/09/successful-mmogs-can-see-1-2-in-monthly-arpu/"

The answer to the mystery is in a footnote... almost an afterthought....

"* Note that this is based on monthly users. Many MMOGs calcuate their average revenue per user (ARPU) based on Peak Concurrent Users. On this basis, ARPU can be more than an order of magnitude higher than the $1.40 guideline."

This is nonsense. An accounting trick. The Peak Concurrent Usage (PCU) of a paid for game is only 5% to 10% of the user account population. If WOW (or most other pay to play MMORPGs) calculated their monthly ARPU this way, it would be between $150 and $300!

The PCU of free games is, logically, an even lower % of their account population as the incentive to come online is lower then if you are paying monthly for the privledge, and accounts of people who quit the game are never removed.

The F2P Emperors' new clothes, it turns out, are far less then their tailors' would have you believe. And as for suede suits, that goes to an old crude aphorism about gullible people I will chose not to repeat.

Saying goodbye to Sun

2010-01-29T17:47:00.001-08:00

Today, Sun Microsystem officially ceased to be.

Sun was a great engineering company that was responsible for some great innovations. It will be missed by myself, and I expect many others.

Through Oracle's official announcements as well as what I am hearing from various friends in Sun, whatever gets folded into Oracle will not be the Sun we knew and loved. Frankly, I find some of Larry's choices to be a bit bizarre, but he bought the right to make bizarre decisions with his cold hard cash.

I do think there is a lot of gold being thrown out on the street in terms of both people and projects. It is my fondest hope that both get picked up by others with the vision to make them the successes they deserve to be. And in terms of what is being kept, well, I predict some indigestion in 18 to 24 months, but I could be wrong there, too.

Kenai to the rescue

2010-01-25T12:38:00.000-08:00

I don't know if this has anything to do with the oracle Sun acquisition or not, but Sun has a new community development site up in beta and its HOT.

I never cared much for java.sun.com. I felt the Oriely software it ran on was ugly and ill fitting to my sorts of projects. But Kenai is awesome. Its a modern interface, has every feature I could imagine I'd want AND has full Netbeans integration. Best of all, its really a site for the community.

Unlike google code, who want to force you into releasing your project under licenses they like, Kenai supports every OSI license that exists. PLUS if you want to use your own license, you can. Now thats what I call community service.

Speaking of Netbeans integration, Ive gone back to NB with NB 6.8 and must say, I am VERY impressed so far. They may have leap-frogged eclipse again. The Scala plug-in needs some work still but is definitely better then the one for eclipse.

Which brings me around to the Scala work I've been doing. But thats for another post...

Conclusion: If you need free open source project hosting I'd *strongly* suggest you look at http://kenai.com

Saying Goodbye to Google Code

2010-01-23T14:52:00.001-08:00

*sigh*

Just when I thought I had found a single provider for 90% of my net needs I could be happy with, I came across the following thread:

http://groups.google.com/group/google-code-hosting/browse_thread/thread/1714c5c0ef5d9f9f/3fc51c3c0ca497ec

Particularly this...

"Basically the answer is when I, Fitz, Greg or the team think it is

popular enough. I know you guys think we don't like it for nefarious
reasons, but what you're missing is we dislike -all- new licenses that
are unpopular. They lead to bifurcation of the open source development
world and that is a high price to pay.

I personally think the AGPL is deeply flawed, and I've commented on
that on my own blog and on others, but that really -doesn't- matter.
If the AGPL gets to be popular, like lgpl or bsd popular, than we'll
certainly offer it as an option on code.google.com, "

The other posters go on to show that AGPL is used on a great many sites and ask how many it takes to pass the "popular" test ... and "Chris" just stops answering.

Now GoogleCode is supposed to be a community site, but here is a google-person stating that a license has to meet *his* particular standards or they won't allow community members to use it

Now I don't know who Chris is, For all I know, he could be a Google founder, but I don't really care. The point of community is not to arm-twist everyone else into doing what you individually want. The idea that google finds such an attitude acceptable has to make me seriously rethink just how google-dependant I really want to become.

As for my AGPL project, I guess I'm headed back to SourceForge who use the yardstick that, if its recognized by OSI, its an okay license. Frankly, I've never been thrilled with OSI either, but its a better yardstick then Google's.

I am Joe, Dragonrider of Deathworld

2010-01-09T17:06:00.000-08:00

So, we went and saw Avatar last night at the 3D IMAX.

It is a beautiful movie. It absolutely sells the mix of 3D animation and live action on a level I haven't seen before. The art direction is simply stunning and highly imaginative. The 3D is used not to poke you in the eye but to immerse you in the space. It was well worth the few extra bucks we paid to see it in large format 3D. It is, in a word, breathtaking.

The story is well written and executed but is mostly a mix of semi-standard science fiction plot vehicles. I wont go into spoilers here beyond the title of this blog, but suffice it to say there are no ideas here that will excite or surprise anyone with a decent knowledge of classic speculative fiction.

I wouldn't call it a great movie, in the way, say, The Godfather is a great movie. This is, in the end, B movie fare. But, of course, thats what Cameron has always been good at. It does have stupendous A-plus production values and is worth watching for the visual spectacle alone. That the story is decent and competently told, is an added bonus.

A tale of three android ad networks

2009-12-20T11:45:00.000-08:00

I wrote a simple dice-calculator app for the Motorola Droid and have been experimenting with various advertisers on the ad-supported version. Here's my capsule review of three; AdMob, Quattro and Greystripe.

Its important to knwo up front that NONE of these so called 'advertising networks' actually tell you how much they pay or for what. Therefor, you have to experiment and intuit. These are the

results of my experiments to date.

AdMob.

The Good:

AdMob is the 800 pound gorilla in this space having been bought by google. Their sdk is the most mature and easiest to integrate. Their ads are also the least intrusive. They will also run your "house ads" for your own products in your other apps for free. Finally, their reporting tools are *excellent* and really give you a good feel of the trends of usage of your app.

The Bad:

Unfortunately, they also pay the worst of all three. Although they don't publish their exact formula (none of them do) it semes to be *heavily* if not entirely base on click through. I've served almost 7,000 impressions, but only had 14 click throughs. Total revenue: $0.88

Quattro.

The Good:

Quattros ads are still fairly unobtrusive, about twice as tall as an AdMob ad. While the SDK is a bit less mature, it is a bit more automatic. AdMOb's view has to be told by your app when to get a new ad. By contrast you just place the Quattro view and tell it how often you want to change ads and it does the rest.

Quattro pays for impressions as well as click throughs and it shows in your revenues. With about 6500 impressions and only 6 clicks I already have made $1.44. Quattro also encourages a faster ad-flip rate and thus Ive gotten those 6500 impressions in something like a third the time it took for AdMob, who I integrated earlier.

The Bad:

Quattros analytics pages frankly suck. You cna ask for number between any two dates but what it shows you is the aggregate total over those days, not numbers by day. This makes trend analysis very hard. They also don't have "house ads". Finally, while their view is easier to integrate, you also have a bit less control over it.

Greystripe

The Good:

Greystripe is different from the other two who are primarily banner-ad suppliers. Greystripe specializes in interstatials, ads that take over the entire screen for their run. They imply on their website that they pay per impression. In fact, their reporting tools don't even show click-throughs. This means you get paid for displaying the ad, whether the viewer clicks through or not.

I have found their tech support responsive, which is important given their issues. (See below.)

The Bad:

Interstitials are by far the most intrusive kind of ads there are. Therefor you won't be generating high impression rates per user if you don't want to drive your users away. I have my app configured to display one on launch and then one approximately every 5 minutes. For games, it makes more sense to integrate the interstitials between levels since you cant pull the screen away from the user mid-level.

Their Android SDK is in beta and is by far the hardest to integrate. To begin with, its not perfect yet. My interstitials don't display properly the text on the buttons to go back to the app or to the linked advertiser web-page. (I've reported this and they say they are working on it.)

The biggest problem however is that they chose to implement their ads not as an Android view, like the others above, but as a separate Android activity. This causes your app to go through life cycle call backs that are exactly the same as when a user navigates away from your app and then returns. This is simply a nightmare to deal with, impacts app stability, and needs to be fixed right away.

Their reporting tools are neither as good as AdMob nor as wretched as Quattros.

The OTHER issue I have right now is that they *say* they pay per impression but their reporting tools aren't showing it. I have 158 impressions so far and its still reporting $0 income. This makes it hard for me to get a grip on what, if anything, they are actually paying me for my efforts. Given that the impression rate is so much slower with interstitials, this is an important consideration.

Conclusions:

Right now, for income (which is why we do this, right?) Quattro is the big winner. They aren't terribly objectionable and pay quite well. If their reporting tools were better and they had the house ad option, they'd be the only banner service I'd use. As is however those values are big enough to make me keep AdMob too. At least for now.

AdMob is the second place producer. They are less then half as lucrative from a payment point of view, but their tools are excellent and have really helped me learn user trends from this first product.

Greystripe has promise, but they need a lot of work. The SDK is definitely not done and need some serious re-architecting. And I'm very concerned that their website has yet to tell me I've made any money at all.

In web-advertising, interstitials are a big money maker and there is promise in this market, but Greystripe has work to do if they want to fill that niche.

A new definition of desperate...

2009-12-06T14:14:00.000-08:00

Senate Republicans trying to claim they are afraid that the health care reform bill will hurt Medicare... A program they have been trying to torpedo as long as I've been a legal voter.

Lets face it. They think Americans are idiots with no memories. Or at least, they think Seniors might be. That seems to be what they are baking on in this latest move to protect their big-money insurance industry supporters from reaping the field of distress they have sown among working americans

If I were a senior, I'd be pissed off at them right now. Course any Senior with still functioning neurons should have been pissed at them for a long time before this.

It reminds me of an old jewish joke...

"Chutzpah is killing your parents and then throwing yourself on the mercy of the court because you are an orphan."

Chutzpah seems to be in no short supply among the republicans in the senate.

No American needs Health Insurance

2009-11-27T09:02:00.000-08:00

But every American needs health-care.

As I reported previously, more people die in this country every month from lack of proper health-care then from drunk-drivers and the accidents they cause.

This simple fact seems to be eluding all our politicians and media pundits. Over and over I keep hearing the goal for our national health care system that "every American has insurance." But as many real american consumers know, having health insurance is no gaurantee that your health care bills will get paid.

Some estimates put the number of "under-insured" already in the current insurance system at 25 million Americans. These are working Americans whose insurance is inadequate and will not cover the bulk of their health care costs.

Any plan that only measures its success by the availability of low cost insurance will have no effect beyond ballooning the number of under-insured Americans. Which will do nothing to keep them from being ruined by the costs of health-care. After all, bankruptcy and pregnancy have one thing in common... you can't be "a little bankrupt", either.

The bulk of non-dillusional Americans have finally admitted the obvious, that we have the least effective and most expensive health care delivery system in the developed world. Even the politicians are finally willing to admit that. But what neither they nor the media are saying is that we are also the only one who counts on insurance to finance the delivery of that care.

The link is obvious. And its a link we must break. We all need to tell Washington that we don't give a crap about health insurance. What we care about, is health care.

You have no privacy already...

2009-11-20T07:34:00.001-08:00

... get over it.

Scott McNealy said that a few years ago and he was absolutely right. This may sound cynical, but you should always be skeptical when law makers say they are going to "protect" you as its almost always from the wrong things. One example is the totally pointless and useless COPPA law, which makes web site developers ask you your age and restrict your ability to communicate with others if YOU tell them you are under 13. Well, I'm sure no kid has EVER lied about their age.... right?

Other examples of "protecting your privacy" have come and gone as legislation and all are equally pointless.

Why? Because people don't have to be required to give their privacy away... we all do it all the time, every day, voluntarily. Its in the decisions we make and the actions we take. Its in anything we do that is "in public' and, lets face it, that's most of our lives. "Sharing" tools like Facebook, web forums, and so forth just increase the amount of information we provide on ourselves.

As an example a group of MIT students recently wrote an "outing" program that predicts someones sexual preference based on nothing more then their circle of facebook friends. It really shouldn't surprise us that who we associate with says a lot about who we are.

You might think you have some security/anonymity if, like me, you use a psuedonym for non-work related stuff. But, it turns out, there is EASILY enough information on the net on most of us to make correlations between our psudonyms and our real personae.

Its not just the net though, there are huge databases on what we do and who we are that pre-date the net. The insurance industry has one that lists every medical procedure you've ever had. Of course there are the credit databases that show our patterns of purchases. The information is out there and, thanks to the cheapness of computing power, the genie is out of the bottle and anyone with some time and some horsepower can put together a surprising amount of detail on any of us. If you doubt that, take a look at this "service" that was recently advertised in one of my professional management forums I participate in.

We have no privacy because we've already given it away, just by virtue of being part of this society. So as Scott said, rather then passing pointless and ineffectual laws, we better start getting used to it and figure out how best to handle it.

More people die from lack of heathcare then from drunk driving

2009-09-20T13:15:00.001-07:00

Harvard has just completed a study that shows that there are more deaths every day from lack of health coverage then drunk driving and murder combined.

http://www.reuters.com/article/healthNews/idUSTRE58G6W520090917

So when someone says to you "I think everyone is happy with their health coverage" look them in the eye and ask if their "everyone" includes all those dead or dying because they have none.

inmates running the asylum

2009-09-14T22:00:00.000-07:00

I know the media likes a gathering. It looks good on camera. It looks even better if they look nutso as so many of the signs at the "9-12" rally in Washington made their holders look.

But lets get real here.

This was an event manufactured and hawked by Fox News, probably the single biggest media in the conservative world with the largest reach into conservative american households. They pushed this thing like JC himself was going to make an appearance. One of the lead spokespeople for it even said on camera that he was "sounding like a televangelist."

And 10,000 people showed up.

10,000 out of a population of over 200 million adult americans. When you figure approximately half the US identifies itself as "conservative" that's a turn out of .008% of their audience.

Edit; revised *generous* estimate is 70,000. Which is a bit more but still only a bit over .05% of the theoretical fox audience. Interestingly, one of the no-shows was Fox's own Glen Beck, who was a primary organizer for the rally...

The real story here? The big money interests behind the desperate attempt to derail health-care reform can now truthfully answer the question "what if you threw a party, and nobody came."

Lincoln was right. And if you ever wanted to see the portion of the people you can fool all the time, then look at that rally. I am heartened to see its is no more then .004% of the country :)

Aion Open Beta Review: A keeper

2009-09-09T07:46:00.001-07:00

I've been playing the Aion open beta the past few days and I have to say my reaction to it is about 180 degree from my reaction to Champions Online.

To begin with, while CO looks like an amateur comic book , Aion is *gorgeous*. Dripping with details, very believable environments and people. Just a pleasure to look at. Having said that, it can at times be "too" pretty. My character is on the slender/good looking side and between the overly ornate (but still formfitting) armor he's currently wearing and a few of the animations, such as the hands on the hips idle anim, he really looks kinda queer. Not that I have anything against queer folk at all, but it wasn't what I had in mind for this character. I suspect this is more an issue of Eastern/Western style clash then anything else, as Aion was originally a Koren game.

For any one who doesn't know, Aion is a "angels v. daemons v. devils" game. The Angles and Daemons are PC races, the devils are the 'spoiler" and are controlled by the computer. (It should be said that this is an over-simplification. Although I'm currently playing a Daeva, an Angel, and i haven't seen the Asmodean side yet (the daemons) the game suggests that it gives both sides in the war a justification that makes them the "good guys" in their own eyes. Interestingly enough the "angels" are called "Daevas"... which is another word for daemon.)

The experience is well paced from both a gameplay and story POV. You spend your first 10 "newbie" levels as a human being. This allows you to learn all the game basics as well as to help you develop an emotional connection to the "humans" before you ascend to godling. The world is rich in story and flavor and i have yet to run into any quest that felt too objectionably like a repeat of a previous one. Both Aion and City of heroes cast the players as exceptional heroic protectors of the "normals." In both quests and making that connection however things Aion does a much better job. The "normals"in CoH lacked any character and were there mostly as Macguffins to retrieve or sources of canned applause. In Aion though every NPC you meet feels like it has its own, rich background story.

At Level 10 you "Ascend" and leave the newbie playpen. At this level oen of the other big features of Aion kicks in-- your wings. In some (but not all) zones you can sprout wings and fly. Again, CoH had flight, but thus winged flight is a more visceral (and harder to control) experience. You are also time limited on your flight so that's one more quantity you need to watch and manage. It was smart of the developers to make you wait for this bennie. Not only did it give you the time to connect with the land-bound humans but it also delayed your trying to learn to manage this while you were learning everything else about playing the game. Right after you get flight you are given a sort of "training quest" to get the hang of it where all you really have to manage is your flight time. This works very very well to introduce you to "flight skills."

The rest of Aion so far is pretty vanilla fantasy MMO. Those who coem to it from WOW (or EQ or even older) will find a lot that's familiar. Advancement choices are mostly through choice of gear and pluses that "socket" into the gear, though you also periodically get important new skills. They have built a "user store" feature into the game that formalizes people selling gear that don't want. This makes them standing around and shouting their advertisements a bit more controlled less annoying and correspondingly less annoying.

I haven't reached what NCSoft calls the PvPvE yet, which is where the three factions clash. I suspect that's probably the "end game". But I AM staying up too late and generally enjoying myself getting there.

All in all I think NC has another winner on their hands and a very natural game for WOWites to "graduate into" when they want a more adult and serious game experience.

The difference between what, how, and why

2009-09-03T13:44:00.000-07:00

This came up in the same conversation I referenced below and I decided it was important enough to make a brief note on. I think its something people can often get confused by.

As a stage magician I've had a great deal of practical training in both critical thinking, and lying. After all, much of a magician's job is to lie to the audience and make them believe it. (Although I also firmly believe that these are lies told with a wink. I always want my audience to know that my job is to tell them a lie they will have fun pretending to believe, even if they really know better. This is why mentalists who pose as genuine psychics upset me. I think you do your audience a disservice when you leave them with false beliefs they might take into the real world and act upon.)

One important critical thinking skill is to be able to clearly separate different questions in your head and not confuse them or assume that proof of one proves another. In specific, our freind the NLP adherent kept insisting that, because the hypnotic techniques he knows work, his explaination of why they work must be right. This in fact is a common fallacy of religious thinking. Someone tells me that x effect has y cause. I see x effect, so I assume that the cause must be y.

I call this the difference between 'what', 'how' and 'why', and I gave him this example:

A piece of paper bursts into flame. That's a 'what'.

A man holds a glass lens at the right angle to the sun to make the paper burst into flame. That's a 'how'.

The great burning turtle in the sky who swims around the world is attracted by his own reflection in the lens and when he stares into it his immortal power burns the paper beneath. That's a 'why'.

From that example I hope it is fairly obvious that the existence of a what and a how does not prove any particular why.

5 signs of techno-babble

2009-09-03T07:33:00.001-07:00

So, I recently ran into an adherent of NLP or Neural Linguistic Programming. This got me thinking about a few things.

Religions always spring up around scientifically unanswered questions, be they the source of volcanoes (Vulcan), the effects of drunkeness (Dionysis) or the existence of extra-terrestrial life (Scientology.) Based on this person I'd hazard a guess that NLP is apparently a religion built around unexplained psychological phenomena. Mostly hypnotic and suggestive phenomena.

Now, from a sociological perspective it makes a lot of sense that modern religions are being born on the fringes of science. Most of our big mysteries today are the areas of science we are still uncovering. And even places where we do have some information, in many cases its information that is hard for a lay-man to grasp and understand. This is fertile ground for mystery religions.

One thing all religions will do is try to improve their sense of legitimacy by tying themselves to the popular understandings and mysteries of the day. In the ancient world, people commonly believed in fate or destiny. That important people were destined from birth to be important. Thus, every story about an important person *had* to include a distinctive and unusual birth story. You can see this in the stories about such people as Alexander the great or Jesus of Nazareth, to name just two.

Today, people are swayed by words they think of as 'scientific' so any recent religion will cloak itself in nonsense phrases that "sound scientific." Here are some words that should flag your suspicion in any statement about the world:

Quantum. People love this word even though they have no idea what it means. The "magic" of Quantum mechanics in the way it breaks with every-day experience has really caught the imagination of people. It seems to "make no sense" yet they know that it has real provable effects. In the common mind, that equals magic and techno-babble will very often try to associate itself with that by using the word Quantum in a totally nonsensical manner. As an example (from my friend the NLP true believer...)
"This is the basis for what is known in NLP as quantum linguistics. It works differntly than you expect." (sic)
Infinite. Another word common people know has meaning but generally can't really picture or comprehend. Calling something "infinite" is always good for an 'ooh' or an 'aah'. This is why there is an entire car company named "Infiniti". Again, another example from NLP psychobabble courtesy of my friend on the forums..
What are you NOT thinking about sends your mind into a search for ALL the things you aren't thinking of. Which is infinite.
Void. The opposite of infinite and again, something that people have trouble imagining and thus has mystical connotations. Like the "everything" of infinite, the "nothing" of void is outside of the common person's every day experience and is thus magical. Another example (amazingly these were all from one thread, most of them from only one or two posts.)
When you break these containers you go back to the "one" or void.
The Unity of Matter and Energy. This is, ofcourse, a direct invocation of the great god Einstien. ;) Eisensteinian physics is really the start of "you don't see it but its true" science in msot people's mind. (Although even Einstein was drawing in part on earlier observations and theories, most common people do not know this.) Einstein's theories are both mysterious and powerful-- everyone knows they led to atomic bombs which are powerful and scary things. If you can invoke Einstein then you can capture his "power"... or at least his power to engage the belief of the common man in things they cannot see or prove. So here is another example from the same source:
everything is one piece of matter nade up from energy. creating labels splits it up and puts it into containers which we call reality (sic)
Theory. Probably the most magical of modern day terms. And one again that common people do not understand. They know that scientists call their ideas "theories" and they have great faith in those scientists. Therefor anything else that is called a theory carries a weight of assumption of truth in their heads. Part of what they don't understand is that even scientists don't claim that their theories are actually true. Just that they are useful and seem to line up well with the known facts. This is one of the big differences historically between a religion and a science. A religion generally tries to prove its postulates truth whereas the whole approach of science is to try to come up with new ways to prove those postulates false. But call your unscientific notion a "theory" and all of a sudden it gains weight with the common man. This is why right wing christians call their creation myth a "theory" these days. And its used extensively in modern psuedo-science religions:
The theory is that this transdiverational search eventually takes you to a place before language and the meaings existed in your mind into the "void" (sic)
You have to love that one. "Theory", "void" a mystical place and an obscure multi-syllable programming term. Now THERE is a magical formula for you!

Those are 5 good examples of scientific techno-babble. In general these are words that should raise red flags in your mind when someone throws them at you out of context. Chances are even they don't know what they really mean. I'd like to end this with one more rule of thumb. This is somewhat tongue-in-cheek but also has a lot of truth to it. I credit Harvard Professor Jim Waldo with this as that's who i heard it from...

"Any discipline that has to explicitly call itself a science, probably isn't one."

Champiosn Online Update

2009-08-24T06:19:00.000-07:00

Alright,

I played with a friend last night who has more of the game figured out. The GUI is awful so I don't blame myself for not finding these, but she showed me how to turn off the ugly black lines. She also says there is a way to get all the powers in power selection but its hidden.

We played together for a bit. The game was faster and easier with a team... but it wasn't a whole lot more fun. In the end its still the same-old same-old boring MMO play and very very reminiscent of the CoH experience.

So while some details have changed my report stays more or less the same. They are scheduled to launch this puppy in a few weeks and sst way too early. I think id maybe pay $5 a month for the experience as is, but no more.

Champions Online (not so) Mini-review

2009-08-22T18:14:00.001-07:00

[Note: This was intended to be a short review, but it turned out a bit longer then I had planned.]

I've been a fan of the Hero games HERO roleplay game system since I was part of a play-test group in high school for the original Champions rules. I've also often lamented that the MMORPG developers could learn a lot from the traditional pen and paper game designers if they ever bothered to talk to them.

Thus, it was with some hope and excitement that I entered the Champions Online open beta last week.

Unfortunately, I guess I have to start this by saying I'm pretty disappointed with the game on a number of fronts.

Because I have the game pre-ordered I was sent an "early" invite to the beta... which began last week and is also open to anyone who goes to file planet. My pre-order "perq" came down to being able to dl a locked copy of the game early and get maybe a few hours jump on those who had to dl it when it "opened." Seems to me its more that I did THEM a favor by pre-downloading and decreasing the hit on their servers at launch, then the other way around.

But okay, so I log on and make a character. First thing I am struck by is the lack of options in the character editor. It seems very reminiscent of my CoH experience but with an even more limited the range of options then CoH at launch. To be fair, there are some options like tails and wings that only came later in CoH. But the range of clothing seems to have been proportionately reduced. Perhaps to make room for these specialty pieces in the art budget. Net effect is a narrow range of general costume options. Struggling and compromising, I come up with something that seems vaugely right for my character conception... a classic sneaky thief type ala Lady Christina in Dr. Who and the Planet of Death. A character type I've played many times in pen and paper Champions games.

Then I hit character stat assignment. Second disappointment. Unlike a pen and paper HERO session, I can't assign stats as I like. Instead I have to pick from a limited list of stat packages according to archetypes they pre-selected. They all seem distressingly combat oriented, but I finally decide that the "acrobat" type fits my character the best.

Next, I go on to pick abilities. The choice is again distressingly narrow and all combat focused. I pick a gun skill and a martial arts skill because this is supposed to be highly skilled human, not some mutant over-the-top power blaster or similar silliness.

For a game that was touting how open ended their character system is, this again feels distressingly like CoH redux ( but there was more range in choice within that system then in this one.) There I picked an “archetype" and then starting powers from that archetype All thats happened here is that it is turned upside down. As I discovered when I later got my first level, my choice of initial powers limited me to guns and martial arts for all future powers. So I'm still stuck in an archetype, its just that it was inferred from my initial power selections.

Alright. That was less then exciting, but maybe the game will play interestingly, I think...

More fool me. As I enter the tutorial it looks almost EXACTLY like the opening of City of Heroes. Im standing in the end of a blind alley-way and directly in front of me is a policeman with a "talk to me" sign over his head.

I won't go into details on this because I don't want to spoil it for people. The tutorial is a bit longer with a bit more storyline. And actually the story line is mildly amusing.... but it feels distressingly like a single player game as I move through it and I start wondering why exactly I'd pay monthly for a single player experience...

I finish the tutorial, complete with fanfares and trumpets about what a wonderful "hero" I am. And here I need to digress because there is a pattern. City of Heroes praised the players as "heroes" for everything they did... some of which was heroic like saving lives and some of which the heroism could be seriously argued like breaking into buildings and confiscating materials all without warrants or chasing down and beating up people on the streets just for belonging to a gang or having an unpopular political affiliation.

Jack Emmert likes to put canned applause in his games. Enough, Jack, really. The only people to whom this player-fawning game behavior has any value really need professional help, not yours. How about making a game for well adjusted adults rather then ill-adjusted 14 year olds?

But I digress. After the feelings-of-deja-vu tutorial I am sent into the “real game" and I go to "Canada." Again, the game play is remarkably familiar. I've been playing MMOs since their inception on AOL. And they are all distressingly the same. This is no different.

The HERO system is one of the most strategically complex roleplaying systems out there. As a HERO player I was hoping to see actual HERO mechanics in play. No luck. The game has me running around clicking attack buttons, and an occasional pick-up or respawn button. There is no evidence that is visible to me, the player, of the timing chart, which is a central part of the HERO system.

My only "maneuver" is the dodge key, which I have to hit and hold at just the right time. Close timing is not really a good idea for a game which has to deal with net-lag. This mechanic worked okay for me but I expect results will vary depending on net-geography of the players. In any event, there is nothing terribly strategic about this.

I mentioned leveling earlier. HERO system is a point system and incremental, there is no "leveling". The same cannot be said for Champions Online. It has exactly the same D&D derived level system every other MMORPG has. At each level you don't get to assign your own points but instead have to chose from a limited selection of new "powers" that are pre-built for you. This again feels a WHOLE lot like City of Heroes, and nothing like the Champions game I know.

About the only place the HEro system surfaces its head is in the stats of items you pick up. And yes, just like every other MMO it has items you acquire to improve your stats. Again, this breaks with the unified point-system of HERO and makes it feel like a D&D/D20 type game. The items are descirbed as stat pluses in somewhat HERO terms, but this leads to a new problem which is context. You have no idea how much "4.2 energy defense" is in the context of the attacks around you because enemies never reveal the stats of their attacks. This makes it a blind numbers game that could be ANY system underneath. Again, very MMO-like, very HERO-unlike.

Im not going to go on much further, I think you probably get my point that this feels like CoH II (and in some ways an inferior sequel) not like any sort of HERO game I was envisioning. But I can't end this without one last gripe...

The game is UG-LY. City of Heroes had some of the nicest, most believable looking human characters I've ever seen in a game. It still stands up well against more modern competitors with much higher graphics requirements like Age of Conan. (Though I must admit that Conan's environments are much lusher and more believable. Thats the prettiest human-scale game I've seen to date.)

Someone decided to go a different route with Champions online and make it more "comicbooky." Ugly cell-rendering draws thick black lines around everything and the characters are much flatter in appearance. To me, this is a step backwards. I couldn't get into WOW in part because of its cartoony look. This in its own way is almost as bad.

Now, it is reminiscent of some of the classic Champions artwork... but that was a game made back in the days when RPG publishing was an amateur garage-shop thing and you didn't *expect* art to look great. This is a big budget computer game. I want a virtual world I can believe in. And reminding me that its a comic book doesn't help that. On the other hand and to be fair, maybe what they are doing is putting me on notice that this isn't a game for me.. a mature thoughtful adult. That their goal is to reach 13 yr old pimply faced comic book junkies of all ages.

If so, then I have to admit they have succeeded well.

An MMO Solliloquey

2009-08-17T11:40:00.000-07:00

To level or not to level,
this IS a question.
Whether to suffer the drudgery and boredom of outrageous grinding,
Or to make short your content and by the players end it.

To die, to Lose.
No more, and by a raise to say
we end permadeath and all consequences
of play that is crap.
Tis of the masses devoutly wished.

To die, to raise.
To raise, perchance to bore.
Aye there's the rub.
For in this state of invulnerability,
what dramatic tension may come
when death hath lost all its sting.

That the masses cannot imagine: there's the fact
That makes an experience so devoid of Roleplay;
For who would suffer a 13 yr old in battle,
The talk of trash, the accent innane,
The sp33k of l33t, the P of K,
The insolence of the child and the childish
That patient and mature player does take,
When he himself might his exit make
to a game of mature adults? who would roleplayers bear,
To grief and annoy under a desperate need for attention,
But that the dread of leveling again,
In the undiscover'd game which fares no better?

That those dissatisfied yet pay monthly puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus economics does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native player of roles
Is sicklied o'er with the wants of the masses,
And enterprises of great pitch and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of improvement.^[1]

Inaugural post

2009-08-13T19:36:00.001-07:00

It seems appropriate that my inaugural post of my new blog page be something related to the presidency.

The special interests and the loons who believe them are out in full feather trying to scare people off of actually getting proper health care in this country. In response, the Whitehouse has done a nice job of creating a "mythbusters" website.

If you have any questions or concerns that health care reform might hurt you and not help you... I highly recommend this site.

If you distrust ALL politicians (and I wouldn't entirely blame you) then here is an excellent site from a group whose only partisanship has ever been to the american consumers.

SMF creation tool

2009-08-13T11:34:00.000-07:00

OpenSoalris (and Solaris 10) have a brand new XMl based way of describing system services. Its a lot more powerful then the old Unix start script system but building the descriptive file (called an SMF) is a bit daunting.

But someone has come up with an answer. This tool builds simple SMFs for you.

Very handy.

Eclipse 3.5 and Flex Builder

2009-08-12T13:54:00.000-07:00

Well, today was shot to hell wrestling with Eclipse, Maven and Flex Builder.

Have I mentioned how much i dislike build configuration?

Anyway, I managed to at least get Eclipse and Flex Builder 3 working. It turns out that thats easier then it looks. Here are the steps I used:

(1) Download and install Eclipse 3.5. I used the J2EE install.
(2) Download and run the Flex Builder 3 installer.
(3) Ignore all the warnings that it only supports Eclipse 3.3 and 3.4. Just keep telling it that you know what you are doing and want to install it anyway. It will end with a scary message about failing and suggest you do a manual install from inside of eclipse. Don't do that!
(4) Here is the magic, when it is done there will be a file in your eclipse/links directory called
com.adobe.flexbuilder.feature.core.link
Open that file in wordpad and you will see it contains one line:

C:/Program Files/Adobe/Flex Builder 3 Plug-in

Edit that line so it looks like this:

path=C:/Program Files/Adobe/Flex Builder 3 Plug-in

Save the file and start eclipse. Voilla!

Updated Script Sandbox

2009-08-09T11:24:00.001-07:00

The one fixes a minor bug and adds support for code from Readers and support for compiled scripts:

import groovy.util.GroovyScriptEngine;

import java.io.Reader;
import java.io.StringReader;
import java.security.AccessControlContext;
import java.security.AccessController;
import java.security.CodeSource;
import java.security.Permission;
import java.security.Permissions;
import java.security.PrivilegedAction;
import java.security.ProtectionDomain;
import java.security.cert.Certificate;
import java.util.Collection;

import javax.script.Compilable;
import javax.script.CompiledScript;
import javax.script.ScriptEngine;
import javax.script.ScriptEngineManager;
import javax.script.ScriptException;

public class ScriptSandbox {
    ScriptEngine _scriptEngine;
    AccessControlContext _accessControlContext;

    public ScriptSandbox(String engineShortName) throws InstantiationException{
        ScriptEngineManager sem = new ScriptEngineManager();
        _scriptEngine = sem.getEngineByName(engineShortName);
        if (_scriptEngine==null){
            throw new InstantiationException("Could not load script engine: "+
                    engineShortName);
        }
        setPermissions(null);
    }

    public boolean isCompilable(){
        return _scriptEngine instanceof Compilable;
    }

    public void setPermissions(Collection<Permission> permissionCollection){
        Permissions perms = new Permissions();
        perms.add(new RuntimePermission("accessDeclaredMembers"));
        if (permissionCollection!=null){
            for (Permission p : permissionCollection){
                perms.add(p);
            }
        }
        // Cast to Certificate[] required because of ambiguity:
        ProtectionDomain domain = new ProtectionDomain(
                new CodeSource( null, (Certificate[]) null ), perms );
        _accessControlContext = new AccessControlContext(
                new ProtectionDomain[] { domain } );
    }

    public Object eval(String code){
        return eval(new StringReader(code));
    }

    public Object eval(final Reader rdr){
        return AccessController.doPrivileged(new PrivilegedAction(){
            @Override
            public Object run() {
                try {
                    return _scriptEngine.eval(rdr);
                } catch (ScriptException e) {
                    // TODO Auto-generated catch block
                    e.printStackTrace();
                }
                return null;
            }}, _accessControlContext);
    }

    public CompiledScript compile(String str) throws ScriptException{
        return ((Compilable)_scriptEngine).compile(str);
    }

    public CompiledScript compile(Reader rdr) throws ScriptException{
        return ((Compilable)_scriptEngine).compile(rdr);
    }

    public Object execute(final CompiledScript script){
        return AccessController.doPrivileged(new PrivilegedAction(){
            @Override
            public Object run() {
                try {
                    return script.eval();
                } catch (ScriptException e) {
                    // TODO Auto-generated catch block
                    e.printStackTrace();
                }
                return null;
            }}, _accessControlContext);
    }
}

Java Scripting API Sandbox

2009-08-07T18:15:00.001-07:00

Well, I am adding generic scripting to my DarkMMO client.

The server passes the name of the scripting language being used and then the script code. The client finds the script engine and then executes the code using the Java Scripting API that is built into JDK 6.

This was all pretty straight forward and easy, however if I let the client execute any code the server sent it coudl be a BIG security hole. Therefor I decided to try to sandbox the code. It has been a frustrating few days but I posted a request for help to users@scripting.dev.java.net and got back a very useful link froma helpful soul there.

From that I was able to figure out how to do it, so here is the result. A generic Java Scripting Sandbox! (Code below) This sandbox is intiialized with the name of the scripting engine you want to use and then can be set to run any code you pass it with any permission set you chose,. In fact, the permission set can be changed on the fly by the main program.

In order for this to work, you need to have a security manager enabled. I do this in DarkMMO with the VM argument -Djava.security.manager

Once you enable the security manager you have to give the code of the program and libraries it depends on permissions or it wont work. I do that with a security.policy file that grants all permissions to the app like so:

grant {
    permission java.security.AllPermission;
};

Finally, I tell the VM to use that security.policy file with this VM argument:
-Djava.security.policy=security.policy

With that in place, the following class runs scripts in a sandbox. All it handles is eval(String) because that's the only kind of script I need to handle, but its extension to the other kinds of evals aught to be intuitively obvious.

import java.security.AccessControlContext;
import java.security.AccessController;
import java.security.CodeSource;
import java.security.Permission;
import java.security.Permissions;
import java.security.PrivilegedAction;
import java.security.ProtectionDomain;
import java.security.cert.Certificate;
import java.util.Collection;

import javax.script.ScriptEngine;
import javax.script.ScriptEngineManager;
import javax.script.ScriptException;

public class ScriptSandbox {
    ScriptEngine _scriptEngine;
    AccessControlContext _accessControlContext;

    public ScriptSandbox(String engineShortName) throws InstantiationException{
        ScriptEngineManager sem = new ScriptEngineManager();
        _scriptEngine = sem.getEngineByName("groovy");
        if (_scriptEngine==null){
            throw new InstantiationException("Could not load script engine: "+
                    engineShortName);
        }
        setPermissions(null);
    }

    public void setPermissions(Collection permissionCollection){
        Permissions perms = new Permissions();
        perms.add(new RuntimePermission("accessDeclaredMembers"));
        if (permissionCollection!=null){
            for (Permission p : permissionCollection){
                perms.add(p);
            }
        }
        // Cast to Certificate[] required because of ambiguity:
        ProtectionDomain domain = new ProtectionDomain(
                new CodeSource( null, (Certificate[]) null ), perms );
        _accessControlContext = new AccessControlContext(
                new ProtectionDomain[] { domain } );
    }

    public Object eval(final String code){
        return AccessController.doPrivileged(new PrivilegedAction(){
            @Override
            public Object run() {
                try {
                    return _scriptEngine.eval(code);
                } catch (ScriptException e) {
                    // TODO Auto-generated catch block
                    e.printStackTrace();
                }
                return null;
            }}, _accessControlContext);
    }
}

Well thats the game industry

2009-08-04T14:30:00.000-07:00

I've spent a long time in the game industry, about 15 of my total 25 years as a professional software engineer. And one thing you get used to in this industry is instability. The average job in this business lasts 2.5 years. Seldom less then 2, seldom more then 3.

As you might have noticed, CampFU is down. Sadly, the economy has forced us to shut the doors on the Camp and I have moved to my next position.

The good news is, its a VERY exciting one at a really amazing game company. The company is Blue Fang Games in Waltham, MA. Founded by ex-papyrus people, Blue Fang has made a name for themselves in the animal games space with their hits Zoo Tycoon and Zoo Tycoon II. World of Zoo, the companies first WII product is going to be launched soon and is really, really neat. It takes the animal game experience to a very close and personal level that I think will be a big winner with both kids and adults.

I have joined Blue Fang as BFG's first Chief Online Technical Officer. I can't tell you what I'm working on yet except to say that its going to be Blue Fang's foray into the exciting world of online games.

So this monkey is in a new monkey house. Stay tuned for more information!

CampFu review!

2009-06-18T14:07:00.001-07:00

Check it out!

Repeating Mistakes

2009-06-16T13:52:00.001-07:00

Just a short note... a number of people have asked me what I think of JavaFX.

First off, I think its both ironic and depressing that Sun made the *same* giant mistake Adobe did. Its a mistake no one who actually understands graphics should ever make. Quite simply, both Flash and JavaFX are vector renderers that work in pixel coordinates.

Bzzzt. Wrong. A hint for anyone ELSE entering this space, google "normalized coordinate systems." I don't know if Silverlight makes this mistake as well or not as I haven't played with it. But in a world of cheap floating point, this is a no brainer. (Frankly you can adequately do normalized coordinates in the kinds of resolution we're talking about with fixed-point math if you had to.)

Secondly, I find the JavaFX project itself, astounding , ironic, and maybe a perfect proof of the concept behind the old IBM joke that "when a project is behind, IBM throws man power at it and makes it more behind." More manpower, beyond a fairly low max, does nothing for a project but bloat it. I have it on report from friends inside Sun that, at the time Sun was bought by Oracle, Sun had 400 people one way or another working on JavaFX. For all that man-power, I'd argue that JavaFX has attained no more "buzz" or penetration then my own alma-mater, Project Darkstar, which, at the largest size its ever been, has maybe 8 full-time people on it. Project Darkstar also delivered usable results significantly sooner.

Finally, I find it as bit sad and maddening. Chris M. and I tried really hard to get Java established on the client 4 or 5 years ago. That's plain old Java. We made inroads into the game industry that can still be felt today in projects inside of companies such as Electronic Arts as well as a whole host of little developers. One of those developers created a game (TribalTrouble) that was a headliner on Apple's games website for over a year. We did all that with, at most, a team of 4 engineers. And we had that team for only a year. Chris and i almost broke the back of the whole process three times with deals in place with Sony to get Java onto the Playstation, and Sun corporate managed to kill each one.

In the end, Project Darkstar was born as much by our realization that we would *never* get Sun to understand client computing, and thus had to get them into games on the server side, as anything else. But with 10% of the manpower Sun has put into JavaFX and a tiny amount of the support, we could've changed the world in ways I am willing to lay money that JavaFX never will.

The one GOOD thing to come from JavaFX in my mind is the "kernel VM." This is a technology we asked for 5 years ago and was told "couldn't be done." HAD it been done, we'd probably all still be talking about "applets." Now that the ground has been lost to Flash, however, it may well be too little too late.

Telling Stories

2009-06-16T12:48:00.001-07:00

I've been thinking a lot lately about something I heard Terry Pratchett (author the Discowrld series and other novels) say in an interview.

"What are we as humans? Chimpanzees with an amazing gift for telling ourselves stories."

This really struck a chord with me, and I definitely think he is on to something. The fact that we tell ourselves and each other stories for amusement needs little explaination. But the more I thought about this, the more I realized how many other facets of our nature relate to story telling. Story-telling has incredible power.

One of the producer's of NOVA described his program once as "the story of science." Certainly, history is the telling of stories, be that military history, scientific history or religious history.

More then that, Science itself is a form of story telling. It is the story of "what exists". When a scientist proposes a theory, that theory is a story about the world. The rest of science is testing that story to see if it matches well with what we can perceive in the world.

Religion too, is a story. A good net-friend of mine who also happens to be an Epsicopal priest once told me he sees religion as "the story of why". The meaning of what is in the world.

The stories of science and religion have had huge impacts on how we live but they arent the only stories we tell ourselves. If science is the "stories of what" and religion "the stories of why" then history is "the stories of who." Who we understand ourselves to be is a result of the stories we tell ourselves, and those stories in turn become the basis for almost everything else we do.

The process of invention is also the process of story telling. Its the story of 'what if.' A man once imagined what might happen if a wire with an electric charge through it were palced in a near-vaccum. The result was the first practical electric lightbulb.

You will note that when i use the term 'story' in this way, it is not pajorative and non-judgmental. I am not drawing a distinction between the "real" and "imaginary." That's because often one man's fact IS another man's fiction. What we decide to tell ourselves is fact and what we decide to tell ourselves is fiction is ITSELF just another story. It is an arbitrary decision we make for ourselves and only has value in that it separates the stories we do apply to understanding ourselves and the world from the ones we don't.

We organize our lives and what we do about them with the stories we tell ourselves. In that sense ALL stories are 'fact.' They are all powerful and can change the world for better or worse. In that sense all stories are equally "real." By the same token, all the stories we tell ourselves come from our ability to imagine. The world does not contain stories, just events. Stories are what we make of those events using our imagination. In that sense, all stories are equally imaginary.

But what is undeniable, to my mind, is how they permeate every facet of what we understand to be our existence as human beings.

if I never hear the word "Theme" again.....

2009-06-11T19:27:00.001-07:00

Okay,
Its time for a patented jeff-rant, and this time its about the idea of "themes" in literature.

As the son of authors, let me tell you something. NO good writer has EVER started a project by saying "hmm, what themes am I going to explore in this work."

Good writers think about character first, and story second. Trust me, Steven King never asked himself, "what theme should I invoke now." But he asks hismelf all the time "what would scare the crap out of them now" or even more often "what would this character do in this situation."

Some writers do write with a statement in mind. Sometimes its to make a point, though more often its to attempt to get the reader to think about the issues and come to their own conclusions. Kurt Vonnegut (who never considered himself a sciecne fiction writer) comes to mind, as do many of the "golden age" science fiction writers. But none of them I gaurnatee you ever thought about a "theme."

The idea of "themes" will not be found in any book on writing written by actual writers. However you find it all over academic literary criticism. This is where your contemporary lit teacher in high school got it from. And, in film school, we had a hirearchy: "Those who can't do, teach. Those who can't teach, critique. And those who can't critique, review."

Unfortunately we now have a whole generation of grownups who believed their conteporary lit teacher that writing fiction was all about "themes." And thus we have a crop of adults who somehow think that talking about the "themes" in liertature makes them seem smarter. Some of them even believe that because they can play "identify the theme" they could be writers.

But I got news. Its just like film criticism. And being able to play "find the phallic symbol" in movies never made anyone a film maker. "Themes" are the phallic symbols of literature, in more ways than one.

Sometimes an artist makes you see something new in something old

2009-05-28T15:07:00.001-07:00

I'm not either an American Idol fan or much of a morning TV viewer, but when I'm working in NYC I sometimes flip on the TV in the AM to wake up to.

The other day i happened to catch this broadcast...

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x9etuq_adam3-reg_music

I never thought of the song "Mad World" as a queer anthem before. But I think I will after this.

Getting smart about licensed game content

2009-05-27T07:46:00.001-07:00

I've been thinking a lot about the issues a game company faces using someone elses licensed IP since seeing the new Star Trek.

I really feel for the guys at Cryptic as I think they've gotten nothing but screwed by licenseors. First Marvel pulled the Marvel Heroes license out from under them half-way through the development of that game. Now JJ Abrahms and Paramount have labeled everything that came before the new Star Trek movie as "Your father's Star Trek."

IMO the new Star Trek is very successful in rebooting the franchise. This bodes very well for the future of the franchise from Paramount's point of view. On the other hand it pretty much invalidates the entire history of the series to date... including all of Next Generation, which is the license Cryptic holds.

Given how much time it takes to develop a major game, I think we need to start writing tougher licensee protections into IP license contracts in this industry. I think there should be serious and significant penalties for canceling a contract for anything but the very best of reasons. I also think the licensor should be liable for actions they take that damage the valuse of the license between the time of contract signing and the first few years after release of the game.

Baring that, I think we need to think long and hard whether it really makes sense to license any IP at all in our business. As is its a major source of uncontrolled risk in the development process-- a process that is mostly about risk management.

The Terminator War

2009-05-23T21:25:00.001-07:00

For my birthday we went out and saw the matinee show of Terminator Salvation (aka Terminator 4.) Its an interesting if maybe flawed film.

The good points. Its a war movie, and that's really what I wanted from this movie. I've been waiting since the teases Cameron gave us in the original Terminator. The movie absolutely sells the post-apocalyptic blasted and machine dominated landscape I at least always imagined from the brief, dark flashes we were shown.

This was Stan Winston's last movie and its a fine send-off for the master of full-size mechanical effects. The film mixes full size props, model work and CG so successfully that I was rarely aware of what technique was in use when.

Unfortunately, the movie is also deeply flawed. John Connor is supposed to be our hero , but in this movie he is practically a supporting character. Although we see his competance and command ability we never really get to know him, and as such, find it difficult to really care about him.

The plot also has a few "dumb" moments. I don't want to give any spoilers, but suffice it to say for a group wearing rags in a world where anti-biotics are rare and valuable, their medivac capabilites when called upon are truely amazing.

They also felt a need to work BOTH tag-lines from previous terminator movies in. The first one is acceptable, but the second when it comes up feels really forced and obvious. It was also Arnold's tag line, and in Christian Bale's mouth it sounds pretty silly.

Another silliness is that at one point John Connor rides a machine that has no business being human-rideable at all. It isnt even particularly important to the story and IMO should have been left on the editing room floor.

On the SkyNet end, there are also some oddities in technology. Without spoiling anything its hard to go into more details, but after you see the movie just consider what it turns out SkyNet has constructed in the context of where it supposedly is in the advancement of terminator technology. To my mind they don't exactly line up.

All in all I'm not disappointed in this film. It did what I wanted, which was really introduce the machine-war in a gripping and visually stunning manner. It also hints at what may be the machine's fatal flaw. It's never stated, but I would argue that the machines' have a problem-- they are built to purpose. In many cases in this film machines under the control of SkyNet *could* have killed Connor. But thats not what those particular machines were built to do. Machines don't go "off mission". They do exactly and only what they are designed and programmed to do. I can see that as eventually being the flaw that brings SkyNet down. But if that was the intent, the script could have made that clearer.

All in all, this was an intersting and enjoyable film, but it really could have used a good science fiction screen writer to tighten it up and remove the "goofy parts."

The ninth wonder of the world

2009-05-23T19:35:00.001-07:00

Well, tonight I saw something I thought I'd never see... A Michael Bay film that actually works.

Michael Bay has an amazing penchant for goofy, over-blown pyrotechnic militaristic spectacles. His first outing, Independence Day. was a god awful mess. So badly written plotted and xenophobic/jingoistic that it led to quite a few internet lists of "what I learned from independence day."

The sad fact of the matter is Michael Bay has all the sensibilities and moral depth of a 13 year old comic book junkie. Its said though that true art is accomplished when an artist meets the limitations of the medium and uses them to their best advantage. I just finally saw the Transformers movie and it is a perfect 13 year old fantasy. Michael Bay met and used his own limitations in this film and, wonders of wonders, it works.

This is not a deep movie. In fact its a goofy, over-blown pyrotechnic militaristic spectacle. But its eaxctly what every kid imagined while playing with his Transformers and watching it unfold on screen is surprisingly fun, even for an adult.

Dying on demand

2009-05-16T11:30:00.001-07:00

Its hard to do anything in this country of value that puts any group with money in a less then favorable position. As such it was just a matter of time til the insurance industry and their cronies started trying to scare people away from getting better health-care.

Last time around the lie was "god forbid we might end up like Canada..." Yes, god forbid we MIGHT end up like Canada. I've traveled to Canada a lot on business and have taken it on myself over the years to do my own survey. And you know what? From cab drivers to business executives, I have yet to meet a *single* Canadian who is unhappy with their health care system. Compare that with the number of Americans who are really happy with their insurance provider. We could do worse then to end up like Canada.

It turns out that the only people who don't like the Canadian health system... are the American health insurance companies. Well, now, there's a surprise, huh?

Unfortunately for the insurance companies this time around, Canada is in SO much better economic shape then we are right now that, when the Comparison is drawn, even the dumbest American has to wonder if being Canadian is really all that bad. SO their new target is England and the brittish National Health Service.

I listen to the brittish equivalent of NPR's "wait wait don't tell me", they call it the "News Quiz." The britts are rather incensed at our attacks of their helath care system and have some both funny and pointed things to say. More or less they all come down to this:

"Well its true, with the NHS you have to wait for treatment somtimes, where as in the American system you can die any time you want."

That about sums it up.

Not Your Father's Star Trek: A Movie Review

2009-05-11T09:44:00.001-07:00

Shelley and I went to see the new Star Trek movie on mother's day.

The tag line for this movie is "this is not your father's Star Trek" and this is more true then you might expect. Without giving away spoilers let me just say that this movie truly reboots the entire series and lets it start all over again while still making sense within the franchise history.

Probably being the age of "your Dad" that they talk about, as a Star Trek fan since TOS, let me say that I still loved this move. JJ Abrahms walks the line brilliantly between keeping all that your dad loves about star trek alive while updating the series in very smart ways.

The action feels "modern" in a quick-cut 21st century style while still also feeling very "trekish". The new actors by and large do a good job of catching the soul of the original performers' performance of these charcters, while exploring their youth in a way we've never been privledged to see before. Shelley and I agreed that the strongest of these was the new McCoy who really seemed to channel DeForest Kelley in his performance.

We disagreed on the weakest. The new Checkov looks nothing like Davy Jones, who Walter Koenig was originally cast to look like. Shelley found that distracting. For me, there was something about the new actor that plays a young Scotty that didn't quite click for me. I guess he sort of has the air of a "slacker" in this film, which just didnt fit the tireless engineer I remember so fondly from TOS.

The science was also a bit hand-wavvy for Star Trek. A magical new kind of matter and travel through black holes feature heavily in the plot. Someone will probably try to claim that there are time-travel paradoxes in the plot as well, but as we already know the Star trek universe contains multiple parallel realities (eg the episopde "Mirror Mirror") these are pretty easily explained away.

Quibbles aside though, this movie was tremendous fun and bodes will for the future of the franchise.

Why people who run factories shouldn't run software companies

2009-05-01T19:18:00.001-07:00

Well, I'm having an interesting debate over on linked in with a guy who has this idea that you can treat software employees as replaceable parts in a production machine.

His logic is that there is always someone else to hire if the employee quits. Many of the greatest minds of the 19thc. would probably agree with his logic.

The problem, ofcourse is that this IS'NT the 19thC. and we arent making Ford automobiles.

His delusion comes from the misunderstanding that he is paying people to spend man-hours producing lines of code. This idea was debunked back in 1975 by the classic book The Mythical Man Month. One of the best known anlogies from that book explains that if one woman can produce one baby in 9 months, it does NOT necessarily follow that 9 women can produce one baby in 1 month.

This is the fallacy of looking at the product of the software process as lines of code. Its not. The product of the software process is problem solving. The code that implements the solution is just the most visible artifact of that process. A far more important part of the process is the thinking that went into the solution. This is what can generate improvements and off-shoots from the original problem and keep you moving forward rather then constantly re-tracing your own steps.

And that lives squarely between the ears of your developer.

The smartest engineering manager I ever knew once said to me, "your most important assets walk out the door every night. You want to make sure they walk back in the next morning."

That means you had better treat them like valued individuals, not cogs in a machine. And if you don't do that, they will find someone else who will.

I did do a bit of research and discovered that my antagonist in this debate runs a two man shop, and thus doesnt actually have any employees. In my mind, thats a good thing for everyone concerned.

The Tao of Bugs Bunny

2009-04-30T16:34:00.001-07:00

Well, so now we have a fun little flu bug for the media to hawk like its the coming of the anti-christ.

Its a times like this I remember the words of Bugs Bunny:
"When you are nervous or in doubt,
Run in panic Scream and Shout!"

People, just because the media knows scaring you to death sells ad space does NOT mean its anything to panic about. A few statistics to consider:

The number of deaths by Swine Flu this month: One.
The average number of auto fatalities a month in 2008: 3109

So, were you to get in your car once a month and drive to the doctor to be checked for Swine flu, you would be about 3,000 times more likely to die getting there then to die of the disease.

Should you be taking reasonable sanitary precautions? Sure, you should *always* be taking reasonable sanitary precautions. After you play with your pets, wash your hands. Its never a bad idea. Covering your mouth, if you can, when you cough is always nice to others.
But realize we live in a bacterial stew everyday of our lives, and all evidence indicates that a certain amount of germ exposure is good for us.

So if someone suddenly sneezes on you, or doesnt have a chance to cover their mouth when they cough, before you go off on them, consider the effect that your haranguing them now may have on their concentration in the parking lot- where they are doing something that CAN kill you. Driving their car.

And remember. Something isn't magically more dangerous just because you heard about it 5 times on the news today. One case is still just one case, no matter how many times the media tells you about it.

Green Capitalism and other Oxymorons

2009-04-23T09:19:00.001-07:00

So, its time to shout about naked emperors again.

This time, my target is so called "green capitalism."

Green capitalism is, at its heart, an oxymoron. Capitalism is predicated on consumption. The more resources we consume and turn into goods, the higher our GNP and the more wealthy our system says we are.

The whole system is geared in fact to drive towards greater and greater consumption of goods. Take, for instance, a dining set. In my grandparents time that was something they saved half a lifetime for and handed down to the next three generations. In our time, every married couple wants to buy at LEAST one of their own. And they can because competition has driven price down to where they can do that.

Unfortunately, decreased prices leave the maker of that dining room set in an awkward position. Some goods are by their nature consumable, such as food. In order to produce dining sets that cost less, the producer must sell more of them over his life time in order to be able to continue to buy food for his family. The market for non-consumables is constrained to the number of customers there are. This inevitably drives that dining set towards "consumable" status, because that is the only way to sell enough of them to pay for all the consumables the producer must purcahse to live. (A related effect also drives the quality down since each dinign set must be produced more cheaply to produce a profit. This further adds to the consumable nature of the product.)

In the end, Capitalism drives more and more resources to be used up faster and faster. This is inevitable. Moving to so called "renewable resources" where possible reduces the impact some what but it will never be possible to have a capitalist economy based 100% on renewable resources.

The only way out of the viciuous cycle is to stop consuming things that can be non-consumables. And the only way to stop that consumption is to stop having to pay for consumables in our lives. And that leads to a totally different economic model. One where real needs are met directly by society, not through an artificial mechanism of stored purchasing power.

Another one bites the dust....

2009-04-23T08:26:00.001-07:00

As I assume most of you have heard, it looks like Oracle is buying Sun. This leaves one wondering what is going to happen to various Sun projects. I have some pretty strong suspicions about what will happen to Netbeans, at least. To quote Oracle's web page...

"Eclipse is one of several open source communities (Apache, PHP, and Glassfish are other examples) in which Oracle invests significant development resources. A Strategic Developer and Board Member of the Eclipse Foundation, Oracle is a leading participant in the Eclipse Web Tools Platform and Technology projects."

Ofcourse, they wouldn't have fared any better being bought by IBM so I suppose the NB guys must've felt the axe falling for a bit. While they have my sympathies, I actually think this is the right thing to do. Sun held onto the NB flag for way too long after it was clear it was an also ran. If I were Larry I'd take the two really outstanding parts of NB-- Matisse and the Profiler, and re-tool them as Eclispe plugins. In the long run they could be huge successes that way, more so then when they were part of Netbeans.

Why we buy

2009-04-18T16:53:00.001-07:00

Sellers don't exist without a market to sell to.

While I've never met an MMO player who didn't profess feelings for gold farmers that fell somewhere between disdain and violent hatred. The fact of the matter however is that gold farmers and character levelers are fulfilling a market need. If the customers weren't there, they'd find some other way to make money.

So the fact of the matter is that "normal" players, despite their avowed hatred of these members of the community, are patronizing them and doing so in great enough numbers to support a fair sized market with quite a number of sellers.

Why do the players do this? I'd argue its our fault as game developers. In order to succeed in our games we require that our players pay in pain. Everyone knows the term "the grind" but how many have stopped to really think about how negative a term that is. The fact of the matter is that the players gave tht name to MMO "gameplay" and its NOT a compliment.

The discomfort is severe enough that at least one player decided it was less uncomfortable to have sex with a stranger then spend the time grinding.

The question i have is, WHY do we put our players through such misery? If we wanted to be honest Id say it was two reasons:

(1) Laziness on our part. Repetitive boring gameplay is *easy* to implement.

(2) Fear of users consuming our content too fast. We want to streatch out their time on line because they pay us by the month, so we make them do these repttitive boring things to make it take longer for that inevitable end-game to happen.

Neither of these are good reasons IMHO. Someone at the IMGDC conference which I have been attending this weekend made the excellent point that noone buys gold from gold farmers in order to get basic quipment. Its always the VERY expensive carrot we hang out there, be it mount or whatever, that drives the players to conclude that they'd rather pay a gold farmer then do it our way.

Clearly, these mechanics are un-fun. Otherwise noone would be paying someone else to do it for them. So who is responsbile ultimately for the prevalence of gold farmers?

We are, when we design un-fun games. Lets fix the problem where it really lies.

High in the Clouds

2009-04-16T10:57:00.001-07:00

Anyone who knows me knows that I instinctively want to attack and tear down over-hyped nonsense. In the past this has included such things as Second Life.

More and more I am running into "cloud computing" as the latest meaningless buzzword.

Well its not really meaningless if you think about it. What after all is a cloud?

A cloud is a body of vapor, made up predominantly of empty air. To create a cloud you need a lot of hot air. So "cloud computing" is actually pretty descriptive of what really exists. Mostly vapor and hot air.

The latest guys to jump on the cloud computing buzz-word and try to ride it like a senior on prom-night are "OnLive." They claim to be able to move your game to the cloud and then (to quote their web site) "instantly sending your controller actions upstream and the results back downstream" over the "broadband internet."

Well, to begin with, as Prof Waldo likes to point out, a guy named Einstein proved quite awhile ago that instantaneous communication over distance is impossible. Even giving them a bit of lee-way on the word "instantaneous" this reeks of someone who has never had to do ANY internet game design. Latencies are an unavoidable reality on the internet. The nature of the beast. Unless they have invented time-travel technology, they are in the same boat as everyone else there.

So until they show me this magical latency disappearing act working reliably in the uncontrolled field, I'm going to count that as one part vapor and two parts hot air. And without that, this whole concept fails. If you've ever played a game that experienced "lag", imagine experiencing that all the time, unpredictably, on every keystroke.

Even if they could make this proposition work, one has to ask "why would you want to?" What they propsoe to do is to take the computing that today is being done on computers we game developers and operaters get for free -- the end user's machines -- and move it all to server horsepower we would have to pay for. Ontop of that they then saddle us with vastly increased bandwidth demands we ALSO have to pay for.

The future of online gaming is clearly the OTHER direction. Figuring out how to use MORE of the free massive parallel network we call our users, not less. There is some interesting research being done right now in Universities in Germany, Scottland and Taiwan exploring how to build that network and utilize it in a way that is reliable and that cannot
be influenced by the owners of the machines. I think practical applications of this work are probably still 5 to 10 years away, but that is clearly the right direction.

In the end, there really is only one possible environment where Onlive's technology can make sense, IF they can get it to work at all. Thats in the hands of the cable providers. They have to pay for the boxes they put on top of your TV, and they ship a lot of them, so they want them as thin and cheap as possible. They also own the bandwidth. So driving bandwidth usage is actually good for them. But thats the only market I can see where the economics *might* make sense. Interestingly enough, since they control the pipes, thats also the only market where they could actually control the latencies of communication to some degree. Instantaneous isnt possible but if they were willing to prioritize the game traffic over all other traffic inside of their closed network, and invest some hefty hardware resources to it, they could probably bring it down to an acceptable level.

But right now, OnLive is a heated mass of vapor. Time will tell if they can manage to be anything more.

My next target in "Cloud Computing" will be our practical experiences with EC2. Watch for it!

"Cause thats where they keep the computers...."

2009-03-25T18:25:00.001-07:00

Famous Bank Robber Willy Sutton said he robbed banks because, "thats where they keep the money."

Willy, the modern world would have confused the hell out of you. Frankly, it confuses me.

I like using half-dollars for coin magic. Their size makes them both seemingly harder to hide while at the same time actually easier to manipulate. When I was a kid I used to get rolls of them at the Bank.

I have a show coming up in a few weeks and I need to start practicing. I went to 3 different banks, all of who gave me nothing but dumb looks when I asked for a roll of half-dollar coins.

I don't get it. The government is still minting them, where are they going? Aren't the banks supposed to be the oens who distribute currency?

I guess these days tha banks aren't where they keep the money, but just where they keep computer records. In the end, I had to order them directly from the US Mint and pay $1.25 a peice by the time I added in rush postage.

Its a very weird world I find myself in.

Redefining Virtual Environment

2009-03-16T10:17:00.001-07:00

Yesterday I gave the keynote at the Massively Multiuser Virtual Environments Workshop at the IEEE VR conference. My address ended with the following quote and contention:

Jeff Kesselman's Theorem
A MUD universe is all about psychology. After all, there IS no physicality. It's all psych and group dynamics.

Now I'd never be quite so obviously egotistical as to name that myself. I was gifted with the title "Jeff Kesselman's Theorem" by Raph Koster about 12 years ago when I posted that statement to the MUD-Dev mail list.

Little did I realize I'd come to revisit it a dozen years later. But in that intervening time, phenomena like Facebook have proved me right. Facebook is a virtual world as real to its participants as any 3D rendered space. It has its own rules and culture and, most importantly, it has an intricate web of human interrelationships.

Because that is what makes a world. Not hills or trees or any of the things we render so well today, but people and relationships. In many ways, the start of the shift of our way of life from 'real worlds' to 'virtual worlds' was probably the telephone. Psychologists tell us that this is what teenagers spending long horus on the phone were doing, creating and dwelling in their own little virtual world of close inter-relationships. If you have someone you call regularly to "stay in touch", thats what your doing, maintaining their presance in your world and you in theirs.

But if rendered mountains and 3D animated avatars arent really the core of a virtual world, then what is? What is the fundemental component that makes a virtual world possible? I believe its identity. A continuos identity allows us to recognize each other and form beliefs and opinions about each other over time. Without that, there could be no relationships. An unusually large percentage of the human brain seems dedicated to recognizing faces. This reinforces how important identity is in our daily lives.

Some Japanese believe that there are many "you"s. There is the you that you perceive yourself, plus the individual unique version of you that exists in the mind and perceptions of every person who knows you. A deep and thought provoking idea that once again speaks to how closely identity and relationship are tied together.

At CampFU we have no 3D rendered environment. But we have a continuous sense of identity. Your personally designed avatar is what others see on the site and in every game you played with them. As we roll out all the features, will also have a sense of presence. You will know when your friends are "around" on the site and have some idea of what they are up to.

And that makes CampFu a virtual world as real as WOW.

Virtual summer is here

2009-02-28T19:24:00.001-08:00

Well,

CampFU opened its doors to campers this weekend. As in any new online system like this there were a few creeks and groans under the sudden load of real, uncontrolled users.

In particular, the automatch system that finds others for you to play with is straining and needs some tweaks. I want to assure all our new campers however that the rebel monkeys are hard at work this weekend on this and other improvements and you should see rapid evolution of CampFU into a smooth and seamless experience over the next few weeks.

We have a whole lot of additional features planned for the site once the basics are running smoothly, including various ways to form on going teams and social connections. This is all being supported by The Monkey Wrench, our real-time collaborative social-gaming web platform. Down the road you can expect other, different sorts of virtual environments to join the Monkey Wrench family of online experiences.

So come on down and check it out. And if you happen to play with someone names C_T_Orangutan, be kind 'cause thats me!

Another one bites the dust

2009-02-24T07:25:00.001-08:00

Well, a once promising MMO is going down in flames. All though the arm-chair pundits are all repeating the common-wisdom. We all know that common wisdom is neither.

Its the usual death-watch chatter. "Nothing can beat [fill in current market favorite here]!" We all know from history that's false. If it weren't, we'd be playing Ultima Online right now. "It shipped too early!", well, that certainly doomed Everquest, or a whole host of other MMOs that went out buggy and incomplete and went on to be major market successes.

That one annoys me particularly because I think it shifts blame from the true culprits for AoC's demise. Yes, there were serious technical issues but thats never stopped an MMO from being successful before. Hardcore MMO players will put up with a lot IF they feel they are being included in the process of fixing the issues. Complaints about incomplete content also fail to acknowledge that the content that WAS included at launch was unique and compelling in a way no other MMO (including the much vaunted WOW) has managed to hit. Since then AoC has filled out the gaps in content that did exist.

The game and quest designers did a brilliant job and deserve recognition for that. The artists did an amazing job and also deserve proper recognition. And the programmers... well, they did no worse then on most games these days, especailly early stage MMOs.

The blame for the crash and burn of AoC *must* fall squarely on the shoulders of Funcom management and their total mishandling of their game's community. To begin with, the game shipped with infuriatingly inadequate customer support. You placed a ticket in the queue, and then about 6 hours after you had gone offline, they'd send you a note saying that they couldn't help you because you weren't online any more and wipe out your ticket. This is a true "customer disservice" system, one seemingly designed to take upset customers and make them more so.

To compound the problem, they outright dissed the PvE RP community, refusing to even answer questions as to why they wouldn't give them basic courtesies, like marking one PvE server an RP server, and instead fawned over and catered to the tiny hardcore PvP minority. After being ignored for the better part of the year and by two successive producers, many of the RP PVE people like myself came to the conclusion we weren't wanted and left.

It wasn't long before AoC gained the reputation of a "PVP gank-fest" discouraging further players from even trying it.

No, the blame for this business failure, as is almost always the case, falls squarely on the shoulders of management. In the end AoC was the Commodore Amiga of MMOs. Those of us old enough to remember can think back to when Commodore bought Amiga. They gained what was a brilliant, decade ahead of its time art machine. And they tried to sell it as a business computer for 4 years and ultimately failed. AoC is a brilliant exploration/questing game. But their management decided to sell it as just another ganker-PvP game. And thus, it failed.

If there are lessons to be learned here they are not "don't try to beat WoW" but "take care of your customers and they will take care of you." Its also not to get distracted by the clamoring of a minority, however vocal. Especially one who, by their very nature, chase others *away* from your product. Instead focus on your core strengths and serve the largest group you can find that they address.

Deduction or Induction? A classic nerd debate

2009-02-19T20:15:00.001-08:00

I've been working on my own game system, MUTT. MUTT has a detective skill that I call "induction." This is because I firmly believe that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle used the wrong word when describing Sherlock Holmes.

A good nerd-friend challenged me on this somewhat classic debate: whether Holmes induces or deduces his answers. Below is the argument my discussion with him produced.

The word "deduction" has a variety of meanings, as anyone can find if they go to the dictionary. Debating such meanings relative correctness would be pedantic and pointless. However Sherlock Holmes is often held up as an example of deductive reasoning in a formal sense. IF we limit our discussion to that issue: does Holmes formally deduce his results, I think the answer has to be no.

I would suggest in fiormal terms a typical Holmes argument takes the following form:

(1) If P then Q
(2) If P then S
(3) If P then T

Q S and T are all true, there for the only reasonable conclusion is P.

He is certainly not alone in this reasoning. This is classic court-room stuff and even has a legal term-- "the preponderance of evidence." But is it, formally, deduction? By deductive reasoning it is clearly fallacious. Just because P is *an* explanation for Q S and T does not make it automatically the *right* explanation for Q S and T. In fact, there is no logical requirement that Q,S and T have the same cause at all, just so long as there are no other predicate statements that say the disparate causes cannot logically co-exist.

Holmes himself in fact shows us this when he describes his own methodology-- "when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." ^[4] In order for this claim to be logically true, it presupposes the omniscience to know all possibilities and impossibilities. What Holmes really means is "When I have eliminated every other possibility I can think of, the one left must be true." Which fits with his ego, but is hardly a logical conclusion.

SO either Holmes does a very bad job of formal deductive reasoning, or in fact engages in educated guesswork from specific bits of evidence leading to a theory of the whole cause, which would be reasoning by induction. I chose to believe the latter.

So what do YOU think? Comments are open.

CampFu is coming!

2009-02-05T10:06:00.001-08:00

I need to congratulate and acknowledge my *super* team here Rebel Monkey.

They have worked long and hard and given up many a bannana break to get us here but CampFu is almost ready to beta! This will be a soft launch so, if you signed up for the beta, watch your email for your invite to go camping. If you HAVENT signed up for the beta, you can do so right now at www.campfu.com

Don't miss out on the fun!

2008 The end of the MMO?

2009-01-23T06:09:00.001-08:00

Many people are looking at the lackluster performance of last year's MMO hopefuls and sounding bells of doom for the genre. While I *DO* think the genre is in trouble, I think most of the commentators miss the real reasons.

In "Kill Ten Rats: Tao of the MMO" the author suggests that the subscription business model is at fault. While I am all for experiments in business models, and in fact we are doing something very different at Rebel Monkey, I don't think his argument holds much water. In the same breath he talks about his friend dropping $200 on Steam games. At $15 a month, thats only $180 a year's worth of gameplay. By the time/value equation that many pundits are saying will drive leisure spending in the down-turn, thats a bargin!

BUT its only a bargin if you are actually being entertianed. And that I think is where the true short fallls have been. Lets look at some of the less then spectacular showings of last year....

"Age of Conan". This game had promise. Although ultimately the same questing-grind as every other MMO, the quests were at least fresh and original and didn't feel like you were doing the same things over and over again. In addition the art direction was simply stunning. This is mreo then eye candy, this directly plays into the "explorer" mode of gameplay. Finding a new, different, and gorgeous vista open out before you with every new area you came across made that an unusual pleasure in AoC.

Unfortunately, AOC failed to live up toits promise in two ways. The first was technical, released before it was technically ready it generated a floodof customer service issues that Funcom was ill equipped to handle. Furthermore, Funcom made the classic MMO mistake of failign to grasp that, when you eneter the service business, customer service is the heart of the business. Their CS support was inadaquate, hastily thrown together, and reeked of condescension and lack of respect for their customers.

In the end, it was bad management that doomed AoC more then anything else.

Warcraft. To be fair I never really expected Warcraft to be very successful. While the GDW Warcraft miniatures table top game is a stand-out in its space, miniatures have *always* been a niche within the niche of wargames. It really didnt strike me as a property with much "legs." Havign said that, Mythic has dopne a nice job with it.

Squint and what Warcraft really is, is Dark Age of Camelot: The Sequel. They have perfected their RvR concept that first appeared in DAOC and moved it from an endgame experience to an important and integrated part of the leveling up process. Its is also painless PvP and thus the only fun I've ever had IN PvP.

Unfrotunately, in the end, it suffers from a number of core MMO problems. The ever-war that cannot be won or lost but just tilted back and forth grows tiresome and boring. Its a story of battle after battle without there ever being a real purpose or conclusion. The Public Quest idea is a nice one, but as you go up levels it gets harder and harder to put together pick-up groups to do them. The zones, while havign soem superficial variety, are in the end uninteresting and do not inspire the same exploratory "wow" factor that AoC did.

I DO have to give mythic credit for understanding they are in the people business and showing more respect for their custoemrs then FunCom.

In the end, I think MMOs ARE suffering, but not from their busines model but rather from a lack of real progress in game structure. The only successful formula in entertainment is "do domething different." And it is here IMO that MMOs have really suffered. Whatw e have seen are, at most, tiny steops and evolutions. Take a look at the language MMO players use to describe their MMOs. The word you hear most often is "Grind." "Grind" is NOT a fun word. I don't knwo why MMO develoeprs havent clued into that yet. If anyone EVER says they are "grinding" your game, you have just failed to truly entertain.

And that, IMHO, is why the genre is collapsing. I give some props to the MMOS of 2008 for trying new thingsm but in the end, they just arent enw or different enough. Rather they are refiniements on gameplay that the players have seen before, done before, and are tired of.

My prediction is that the next break through MMO will do gameplay very differently from MMOs of the past.

Who knows, it might be us ;)

Rebel Monkey Darkstar test and Web fun

2009-01-10T08:24:00.001-08:00

Just a short note,

Now that our web app is coming together we were able to give our Darkstar servers a bit of a work out last night Results, though still preliminary, were very positive. With about 12 people going in and out of game sessions with 3 to 4 players per session everything worked, nothing died, and we saw almost no Darkstar server load.

With any luck we should be able to move to testing an order of magnitude more players in the next week.

Meanwhile, some thing we've learned about Web2.0 along the way.

(1) The Netbeans 6.5 profiler is totally broken with regards to Glassfish 2.0. Really, people, this is NOT good. The current release of two products central to Sun's Web 2.0 strategy don't work together. Even worse, there is silence on this fact such that we wasted a week trying to figure out what we were doing wrong before we gave up and went to a commerical profiling solution. And for any Sun folks reading, a quick translation: a week in a start up is about the equivalent of 2 months of development Sun time.

Sun is my alma-mater and I love it, but I gotta be frank: this is NOT the way to win customer loyalty to your software products. The NB profiler is really about the only thing NB has going for it when compared to Eclipse. Breaking it is a bad bad thing.

(2) Bayeux is a bad joke. Its a messaging protocol designed by people who know nothing about building secure online systems. Its biggest weakness is that it is ONLY a client to client protocol. A clue for any Bayeux people listening... that makes it almost worthless in the online game space, chat space (where you want to do server side message filtering) or almost any other at all sophisticated web app. We're struggling with it now but we will be replacing it soon with a custom built, true Comet based message hub that allows us to push messages from the server as well as from clients and in general have the server involve itself intimately in the message stream..

Other then that, our hodgepodge of web technologies is working out fairly well. I'll be submitting a talk to AGC where I will dissect what we've built, what we used, and all the lessons learned. I submitted that talk to CGDC which is earlier... and they turned it down. Which frankly astounds me. BUT of course the blindness of CGDC to the online game phenomenon is part of what made AGC happen to begin with so maybe I shouldn't be so surprised.

I guess EVERYONE is glad to see the last of GWB

2008-12-31T11:50:00.001-08:00

Now its truly the happiest place on earth...

Alpha Leader: All Systems are go!

2008-12-09T16:54:00.001-08:00

Well, last night we had the first Alpha test of our J2EE + Darkstar based online service-- CampFu.

I'm proud to say the Darkstar servers behaved flawlessly. We have some tuning to do on the J2EE side but all in all the test was a success.

We haven't really loaded the Darkstar servers yet as the J2EE performance issues are getting in the way but I hope we'll have those cleared away enough in the next week or so to really see what our Darkstars can do!

More virtualization fun

2008-12-08T20:01:00.001-08:00

Neverwinter Nights also seems to work well under parallels 4. This is very handy as it means I can use the Aurora Editor from inside of my Mac. Thats very handy for my DarkMMO project which i hope to return to soon.

Next thing Ill try is The Witcher. Its based on the Aurora engine as well though I understand they made some of their own mods to it.

One small step for an emulator, one giant leap for Mac-Kind

2008-12-08T11:02:00.001-08:00

Just a short note.

I upgraded to Parallels 4 this weekend and, on a whim, tried both of my current online games, WAR (Warcraft: Age of Reckoning) and City of Heroes.

Now WAR refused to even run, claiming my video card didnt have necessary features, but CoH some what surprisingly ran perfectly. And fast!

CoH is of course an older game with less stringent video requirements, but its not exactly a relic.

This is a very good sign for running games in general under Parallels!

Missing the big picture...

2008-12-07T11:39:00.001-08:00

SO, people have started sounding the death knell for Age of Conan.

Over on Kotaku, a writer who probably should have the by line "WOWFANBOI" writes:

"

With Wrath of the Lich King out, everyone's forgotten Age of Conan ever existed."

He pulls half his article from a better writer over at Vox ex machina.

However in the end, though they get the big picture right, that AoC is in its last gasps, they get the details all wrong.

The assertion that the post 20 game was ugly and uninteresting is sheer nonsense and reads like someone who got to the level 20 change-over and quit. There IS a bit of a learning curve at level 20. The world opens out. Rather then hand holding you through a tight series of in-your-face quest assignments it becomes much more of an exploration game.

If you take the time to explore though you are rewarded with FANTASTIC vistas that are much more visually awe inspiring then anything either in the pre-20 game or WOW. The quest design ranges from good to epic. AoC gave me moments of true cinematic experience in the quests-- something not other game has done before or since. Yes, the voice acting that's in the pre-20 quest assignments disappears. its not something I missed very much.

Why then is it dying? Why did I quit if I liked its design so much?

The answer is failed management. A management that ignored the majority of the voices of its users and instead obsessed on the hard-core PVP minority.. It is thus not surprising that the game evolved into a game where "In the end, all that is left are guilds of gankers, hiding in grinding caves and waiting for someone to unstealth. " This the game of the hardcore PvPers. And as many MMOs have proved before it, that's a very small community.

In the end, no matter what the WOWees might claim, WOW succeeds and AoC fails not because of great WOW quest design. Or even good WOW visuals. But because WOW caters to the majority, the PVE players, where as AoC dissed them.

Now is the time for Sun to buy itself back

2008-11-16T12:07:00.001-08:00

As a 9 year Sun veteran, I watch the continued turmoil inside of Sun Microsystems with a somewhat heavy heart. A few days back Sun announced yet another lay off, this time 18% of the work force.

I actually think that some of the cut and the reorganization that is coming with it is good. Sun still had some areas of the company that were actively holding it back from evolving and the rumors i hear are that the cuts are going to be heavy in these areas.

However, I am afraid it wont be enough.

Unlike many others, having seen Sun from the inside, I am actually a Jonnathan Schwartz fan. I've watched him from the moment he took over and seen a bold, innovative, and incredibly smart guy with the guts to make big bets for Sun's future. However, I think his ability to execute has been hamstrung on a number of levels.

From the inside, he has had to fight a deeply entrenched culture that desperately want to hang onto Sun's existing way of doing business, selling servers, even as market forces grind the margins on that business into the dust. From the outside, he is stuck with having to make quarterly figures for the stock market, even though it takes a lot more the 3 months to retool a company. Every time he cant make quarterly figures, he has to figure out how to do what he is trying to do with even less people as he makes the market-demanded personnel cuts.

Which gets me to the point of this blog. Sun's market cap is down to 3 billion dollars. Sun has at least that much still in the bank. I believe that now (or not too far in the future, if you want to bet on the market in general dropping even lower)
is the time for Sun to take itself private. Buy the controlling interest off the market and give Jonnathan the room to succeed or fail on the merits of his ideas... not because a short-sighted markt is forcing upon him short-sighted decisions.

A quick note on Caribou Barbie

2008-11-06T17:12:00.001-08:00

A lot of the radio talk today was about whether Palin helped or hurt McCain in the presidential race.

All the debate seems to be over did she do well this demographic v. did she alienate that demographic and was her style too strong or did she help by saying tough (some might say slanderous) things that McCain couldn't or wouldn't say.

As far as I am concerned all this misses the most important point. She defintiely hurt McCain with one crticial demographic... and that was a demographic of one.

Gen. Colin Powell cited the choice of her as VP as the thing that finally goaded him into openly endorsing Obama as his candidate for the presidency. Until then, his long standing freindship for McCain had kept him neutral.

That, to my mind, was far and away the most important for Obama, and damaging to McCain, endorsement of the entire campaign.

So there is no doubt in my mind that running Caibou Barbie turned out to be a devestating mistake.

A word for MacCain

2008-11-06T14:00:00.001-08:00

And now a word for the Hon. Sentator from Arizona... and its not PPPBBBTTT!

I actually think John McCain's concession speech was terrific. I especially appreciated the disapproval he showed at his loyal followers booing at the name of the President Elect.

This is the John McCain I remember from when he ran againt Bush. The John McCain I could actually consider voting for. He disappeared during this race, replaced by a low pandering B grade politician but in defeat he was far more gracious then he had been when he had a chance.

I don't really think that this is his fault. I believe John McCain to be a man of great loyalties and very much driven by duty. During the campaign, I think he felt obligated to run it the way his party, driven by slime like Karl Rove, told him to. Once Barak Obama was elected, however, I think the same sense of duty drove him to support his new president.

I also think John McCain wants to end his career with something historic. And if thats not being president, he can at least be a major player in the administration OF an historic president. I think he'd be an asset to all concerned and I, and I hope our president, would welcome his involvement.

As for Ms. Palin, well, I was inspired by a friend of my wife's at seminary. Joyce, this is for you....

Episode 3: A new hope

2008-11-05T09:07:00.001-08:00

Okay, this ISN'T about Star Wars, sorry. Its just my geeky way of talking about my feelings today, the day after we elected our first Afro-American president.

Listening to the Radio today I heard a lot of back and forthing about what this means. (Besides meaning that much of America hates George W Bush and anyone associated with him.) The focus seemed to be "does this mean America is no longer racist."

Well, would that it did, but that's jumping to the ends of a story that we are still very much at the start of. I don't think this means racism is dead in America. I don't even think this means that specifically racial prejudice against Afro-Americans in politics is dead. But I do think its the start of something.

Today, I find myself thinking a lot about a baseball player named Jackie Robinson. Branch Rickey, then president of the Brooklyn Dodgers, was a pretty wise man. When he decided he wanted to integrate his baseball team he went looking not just for a player who was as good as the white players, but one who was significantly better. And not just better at baseball, a better figure of a man. He knew that *any* negative perception of the first black player in the major leagues would doom the effort. Foibles and weaknesses that would be forgiven in any white player would be held up by the opponents of the effort as "obvious signs that black men aren't suited to playing a 'white game.'"

The words "black man" would not have been used at the time, but we all know what word woudl have been and there is no reason or excuse to use it here. But the man for the job would have to listen to it, day in and day out, and not rise to the bait. To be better, much better, not just then all his fellow players but then the people who would seek to pull him down.

Not only did he need a man who could survive such a scrutinized and intense fishbowl of a life, but he needed one willing to do so. That takes a very special kind of commitment. One I think very few of us could have. I doubt I could.

He found his man in Jackie Robinson. And thanks to Robinson's bravery, strength of character, and willingness to self-sacrifice-- today crowds of Americans of all races and background routinely gather into stadiums to cheer loudly for teams composed not just of white and black men, but many other races as well. It didn't happen over-night. But jackie Robinson started the process that led there.

When I look at Barak Obama on the podium, I see Jackie Robinson. And the same rules unfortunately hold for him. He had to be not just a good politician to get where he is now, but a great one. In all likelyhood the greatest one I am going to see in my own lifetime. But its not over with the election. The kind of wanton mis-deeds America has forgiven other Presidents for, he won't be.

He will need to be better then them, better then all the rest of us. When he talks about wanting to unify America it can't be the Bush/Rove idea of unification which came down to "Okay, now everyone unify by doing it MY way." He is going to have to really follow through on his acceptance speech promise to make all of America feel listened to and engaged. Even people he might inwardly cringe just to be in the same room with.

But if he can do it, then it just might be the beginning of the end of prejudice against Afro-Americans in the American political system.

A historic night

2008-11-04T22:45:00.001-08:00

There are a few days in my life that I think of as watershed moments.
I can usually tell them by the feeling of almost surreal amazement that accompanies them. I have three...

The first, when I was very young, was watching a man step out onto the lunar soil. The idea that, not only was there a man on the moon, but that I was *watching* the moon. That I could see into space and onto another world, was an amazing thing. A good sort of amazement.

The second was when the Space Shuttle columbia exploded. I was in college and walking past our student union cafeteria which had one of those early monster-sized big screen projection TVs. I stood there and watched the footage in utter disbelief. Such things happened in books and movies, not in real life and I could not get over the weird feeling that I was watching some movie and not reality. That was a bad sort of amazement.

The third was tonight, when a man with a black father and white mother, and a face America calls Afro-american, became our next president. I wanted to believe it was possible, but I am still absorbing the fact that it is reality. This, again, is a good sort of amazement. Its the kind of miracle that brings with it a renewl of faith. In this case a very secular miracle and a very secualr renewel of faith, to whit my faith in the American people and our system of government. A faith particualrly sorely tested, and found somewhat lacking, these last four years.

The thing about parents is that, if they are good ones, they are always older and often wiser for it. They've seen the cycles of the world and how it turns and have the hindsight to recognize it coming around again. When I had all but lost my faith in this country, was convicned that the police state it had become under the administrationof George W Bush was going to be a permenant fact of life in America, mine told me not to give up. That when the people really come together they *can* change things in this country.

Well, they were right and tonight proved it. I suppose every cloud has a silver lining, and if a President Obama is the silver lining of having had a President Bush the past 8 years, maybe it was all worth it.

But as I think about this amazing turn of events, I also find myself thinking about how we got here, and what my parents and others of their generation did to make it possible. Because this didn't just happen because the American people are sick of what has been done with our government the past 8 years. It also happened because we live in an America where it *could* happen.

There will likely be a lot of talk in the coming weeks of Dr. Martin Luther King, and there is no doubt that he was very important in getting us to where we are. But there are a lot of other people we owe a debt of grattitude to. People who risked abuse, pain, torture and even death to oppose an unjust way of life. People without names we will ever know. People of my parents generation.

Barak Obama is an amazing man, of any skin tone. A politician the likes of which I don't think I've seen in my lifetime. The analogy I keep coming back to is the stories I've heard of how people responded to JFK. He has that kind of leadership. And i have no doubt that it took such a man to cross this line. But when I think about him, and what my generation has to be thankful for, I am reminded of a famous quote of another man history remebers. Sir Isaac Newton who said:

"If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants."

To those whose shoulders we all stand on today, you know who you are, and thank you. If not for you, none of this could have happened.

Flip flopping like a fish out of water

2008-10-30T14:36:00.001-07:00

It seems McCain and Pallin have never met an opinion they didn't like.

Having completely failed in their attempt to convince America that following in Bush's footsteps was "change." They have changed their tune.

Turns out change is *bad* according to the snippet of McCain speech I heard the other night. All that change Obama wants? Its gonna hurt you. Really. Stick to the status quo...

I have to admit there is ONE change from Bush to McCain.

Bush was a notably more convincing liar.

When not to use events

2008-10-26T16:19:00.001-07:00

I've been doing a moderate amount of ActionScript/Flash CS3 coding lately and I've been learning a few things.

Many languages have facilities that seem on the surface to be cool ways to save time but that can hurt you badly if you don't understand where they should and shouldnt be used. In Java, a common beginner's stumbling block of this sort is the reflecion API. In AS3, it's event dispatchers.

Event dispatchers seem like a great general way to tie code together. All you need do is declare an object's class as an EventDispatcher and anyone else can register with it to be notified of events. This can be very handy HOWEVER it is key to realize that a an event dispatch is NOT the moral equivalent of a function call on the listener. Making this mistake can cause no end of subtle errors.

What then is a difference? Well, when an object's method makes a direct call to a method on another object, that call is synchronous. The called method is executed immediately on the same call stack as the calling object. As Flash CS3 is a single-threaded execution engine, this means that order of direct method calls is deterministic and predictable.

However, when you dispatch an event, all that happens is that the event you dispatched is added to the event dispatcher's event queue. That method invocation will not actually happen until the queue gets processed. This will happen at some later time that is not under your control. Event dispatches are asynchronous, which is to say their order is not entirely deterministic.

Different events dispatched to the same event queue will reliably get processed in the order they were dipatched in. However, every instance of an event dispatching class has its own queue. What order these queues are processed in in relation to each other is again, up to the execution engine and something you have no control over.

The upshot of all this is this, event dispatch in AS3 is fundementally asynchronous. You should never use it for making calls to other code where there are requirements on the order in which such calls get executed. Use a direct reference to a listening object instead.

If you follow this rule, then the single-threaded nature of AS3 will keep you from ever having to worry about race conditions leading to heisenbugs. (A heisenbug is a bug that changes when you try to examine it and they are among the hardest to find and fix.) Ignore this rule and I guarantee you will have exactly that.

Conan and the Rath of Empty Words

2008-10-25T20:06:00.001-07:00

Well,

Today I quit Age of Conan.

I've been playing WAR. Its not as pretty as AoC. But the thing is, its a lot more fun. I even enjoy the PvP in WAR and I'm a stolid cooperative gaming PvE type player.

Even so, i might've held out on AoC. As I've blogged about before there was a lot I liked about it, but in the end, its incompatent management made my decision clear.

Godager was an ass. He ignored his players preferring instead to produce sermons from the mountain. He told us how wonderful his agme was while we were screaming at him about things that needed fixing. Simple, obvious and easy fixes, like giving North America an official PvE RP server. Over 600 users entered their names on a forum topic asking for this simple consideration. Something that could have been done in a minute with an administrative command. Instead, he chose to ignore those customers, refusing even to answer "no" to the request.

That was bad enough, but then he was replaced by Morrision. Mr. Morrision has spent a huge amount of time talking to the press about the new, responsive attitude he is bringing. The thing is, he seems to be spending so MUCH time talking to the press that, apparently, HE doesn't have the time to address the concerns of his PvE RP players either.

Being ignored by a company we were paying $15.00 a month to was bad enough, but heraring this *total* ass tell everyone how much he cares about the players' opinions and STILL being ignored is beyond insulting.

Morrison's latest proclimation that he will win back his lost customers by word of mouth is the most laughably empty statement yet. If you want to win back your customers, show you care enough to LISTEN to them.

When I hear you are treating PvE RP customers like real customers, I might think about coming back. But not before.

I have this idea for a game....

2008-10-13T10:41:00.001-07:00

So I see this question pretty often these days from people outside of the industry:

"I have a video game idea and I am wondering if anyone can provide any
insight where to begin. I know thousands of people say thay(sic) have good(sic)
game idea, but I really feel passionate that it can be successful."

Here's an answer. Its probably not the answer you want to hear, but its an answer:

Do you have money to spend on this?

As an experienced business person I hope your not surprised by this question. Ideas, are indeed, a dime a dozen and worth very little if anything at all on their own.

If you don't have your own money or don't have enough to fund the entire project you will need to get a publisher involved, A game studio with a good track record for delivering product can pitch an idea to a publisher, you will need more. You will need a demo that shows enough of the game to give the publisher confidence that you have the "chops" both technically and artistically to pull this off. You are asking them to make a pretty big money bet in your team's ability. They need confidence that its a good bet to make and they get that from either a track record or clear evidence of your team's talent.

If you really believe in this idea and have money to spend, you have two options. You can start a game company or you can hire a contract shop to do it. There are some *very* good contracting shops in this business but they don't come cheap.

If you decide to build a company the first thing you MUST hire is an experienced game producer. Think of this person like a general contractor. They know what has to happen to make this project successful-- you don't.

If you know friends with coding and art ability you could try to self-exploit and get them to help with the demo in return for a stake in the project. Most good people in this industry however have both too little time and too little money to take such fliers.

So here's your reality check. Ideas are a dime a dozen. If you have money or friends willing to donate their time you might be able to get this to demo level and then shop a publisher. But no one is going to give you money based just on your idea and personal conviction that its a "hit concept".