Cut The Rope Won "Best Handheld Game"

Pretty awesome to see an iOS app winning a GDCA for Best Handheld Game. Next stop: Game of the Year!

Sounds like it was a fun awards show. GDCA was one of my favorite parts of GDC in the past...I hope to go next year!

A Couple Of Mash-Ups

Saw a couple of amazing video mash-ups, thought they were worth sharing.

Scott Pilgrim's Threshold 8-Bit vs. How Low by Ludacris.


Also, the "first" live performance of Smack My Bitch Up, circa 1965.

Snake? Snake! SNAAAAKE (Oil)!

Gotta hand it to them, Steorn just won't quit peddling their unproven "free energy" device. Despite not yet achieving a successful public demo in the past (but they sure did boast), Steorn wants you to shell out 399 Euros for an "Orbo Evaluation and Development System," which will let you:

Evaluate the core principle of Orbo Technology, which is that a time-variant magnetic interaction leads to a non-conservative energy result

Le sigh.

Core-Count Wars?

You want singularitarianism? Think of how long ago (answer: not long) the "Giga-/Mega-hertz" wars gave way to multi-core CPUs, and now this:

AMD CTO of servers Donald Newell prognosticated that the number of individual CPUs on a chip won't go up forever: "There will come an end to the core-count wars," he told IDG News. Just as the megahertz race was eventually defeated by thermal restrictions, so too will the number of cores on an chip cease to increase. " I won't put an exact date on it, but I don't myself expect to see 128 cores on a full-sized server die by the end of this decade...

Accelerating returns!

FF14 Uses BitTorrent to Patch Itself

I picked up Final Fantasy XIV this morning, specifically the ginormous collector's edition so that Sora and I can play together during the 30-day trial.

By the time I got home with the box, I had an hour before I needed to leave for somewhere else. No problem, I figure I'd have at least enough time to install the game, watch the opening movie and roll a character. There has been a patch or two since the game came out, but my ISP provides 16Mbps downstream.

Only problem there, is that Square chose to use BitTorrent to update their users. As I write this, 50 minutes have passed, I've downloaded 10% of the patch, and my current U/L is 8.0KB/s to zero.

That's right, I'm uploading this patch to other users while my 16Mbps downlink sits idle. Why Square doesn't have *any* usable seeds running in my vicinity is beyond me, but this has so far been a terrible experience.

Salaries, The World, and You

So, Joystiq is bemoaning Satoru Iwata's low salary. He makes $770,000 per year. Tell me one remotely-reasonable thing that he couldn't afford.

As long as he didn't buy Nintendo stock when I did (Goddammit), he probably makes a hell of a lot more than $770,000 per year. I wish more companies followed Nintendo's model, and gave CEOs, rockstar-employees, and headline-makers far lower salaries, enough to live a very comfortable life, but nothing on the 7-to-8-digit obscene salaries that Western companies pay to their big players.

A company's success should belong to that company. It should NEVER belong to that company's leaders, nor its peons, because neither one is solely responsible for said success. That money should be reinvested into R&D, marketing and customer benefits. It is an insult to all involved parties to see that wealth distributed in unfair ways.

IGF Call for Submissions

So the time has come, once again, for all good indie game developers to...well, to make indie games and submit them to the Independent Games Festival.

My company, Gendai Games, is looking forward to seeing our users submit some awesome work this year. If you're interested in participating in IGF, you could do a lot worse than to head to GameSalad.com and whip up a killer app!

Best of luck to all the participants!

Replace "BP" With X

Hannibal of Ars Technica brings up a good point.



Are we even slapping these guys on the wrist?

The Spammers Win

Gah. Okay. You must now have an OpenID to post here. Too much spam, and I have better things to do than delete that manure.

The Pains Of iPhone OS Development

JWZ has written a pretty scathing (yet very entertaining) indictment of the whole "it runs OS X" aspect of iPhone OS programming. Some choice quotes:

I think it's safe to say that MacOS is more source-code-compatible with NextStep than the iPhone is with MacOS.

That's like, the defining characteristic of OpenGL. So OpenGLES is just a slight variant of OpenGL, in the way that [a] unicycle is a slight variant of a city bus. If you can handle one, the other should be pretty much the same, right?

Granted, most of his gripes are with the APIs, not the environment, but it is pretty lame that you can't, for example, get the HSV version of a color on the iPhone. Like he says, it feels like someone actively sought out and removed valuable API hooks. Le sigh.

Romanizations Go Bye-Bye, Plzthx

I got a request that my romanization-removing userscript for KoreanClass101.com be extended to also remove distracting Romanizations from its sister site JapanesePod101.com. That sounded like a good enough idea, so it's done!

Just head on over to the tool's userscripts.org page to install it. Don't know how to install it? You need GreaseKit for Safari, Greasemonkey for Firefox, or a new web browser if you're using IE.

Update: I realized I hadn't added the other requested feature, namely removing Romanization from the searchable dictionaries. I've added that, and it should work for both JapanesePod101 and KoreanClass101.

Two Cool Things About Google Buzz

Because if you can't say anything nice...

1. Buzz will group together posts that you make in a short span of time. I shared four articles from Google Reader in the space of about a minute, and they appeared as one "Buzz," like so:


2. Buzz on the iPhone gives you two lists: the buzzes of those you follow, and the buzzes of those nearby geographically. I presumed this was done using Google Latitude, but it seems like they're getting the info from elsewhere.

Also, I wrote this post on my iPhone. It wasn't very comfortable, but it wasn't very painful either. Looking forward to trying out the iPad to see if the larger form factor makes it nicer. I'm almost as excited as Mr. Forstall here:



"You don't even think about it! You just....do!"

Preach on, Scott.

Fastest 3G Network?

Verizon sure is wailing on AT&T these days, and AT&T's rebuttal ads featuring Luke Wilson aren't a very convincing response.

Anyway, isn't T-Mobile's 3G network the fastest? I thought they were the first and only 7.2Mbps HSPA rollout. Did AT&T match that? If so, is being tied for fastest still "the fastest?"

YouTube Closed Captioning

YouTube has a cool new feature that will try to make closed-captioning available by programmatically transcribing the audio.

If your video has technical jargon, turn on captions! The results may be unintentionally hilarious.

Various Google-Fails When Building Chromium OS

The first step in the Chromium OS build instructions is to run the script make_local_repo.sh. This will build a local repo from which your chroot environment will grab packages. However, this script has a bug where it will not wait for an APT lock. In my case, I was installing another package via apt-get when I ran the script, so it bailed out early when it couldn't get the apt lock, and hosed my repo.

The not-so-helpful error you will get once your local repo is screwed up:

khaki@onion:~/chromium-fake/src/scripts$ ./make_local_repo.sh
Creating repository directory...
Updating chromeos_dev from /home/khaki/chromium-fake/src/package_repo/repo_list_dev.txt...
chroot: cannot run command `reprepro': No such file or directory

It's easy to fix this, just delete the "repo" directory in the Chromium OS root directory (along side "src" and "tools") and then re-run the script.

Also, Google didn't include the full list of prerequisites for running the GClient build tool. If, right after syncing WebKit and WebCore, you get this unhelpful Python traceback error message:

Traceback (most recent call last):
[Snipped here by yours truly.]
File "/home/khakionion/depot_tools/gclient_scm.py", line 195, in _Run
sp = subprocess.Popen(cmd, cwd=cwd, stdout=stdout)
File "/usr/lib/python2.6/subprocess.py", line 621, in __init__
errread, errwrite)
File "/usr/lib/python2.6/subprocess.py", line 1126, in _execute_child
raise child_exception
OSError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory

...Then you don't have Git, which is understandable, because it's not listed in the prerequisites for Chromium or GClient. But, if you're building Chromium OS, you should be calling "gclient sync" with the deps="chromeos,unix" command, making Git a dependency. Easy to miss, because Chromium's instructions don't consider the existence of Chromium OS. If you're using Ubuntu Karmic Koala, a simple "sudo apt-get install git git-core" will fix you up. You don't have to restart anything, just call the same "gclient sync" command you used before, and you'll continue at the first Git command that broke before.

Fixing Framework Search Paths

Just ran into an interesting quirk in Xcode that kept me from building device versions of iPhone apps. The resolution was a bit hard to find, so I thought I'd post it up here for posterity. In a nutshell, it is possible to include a framework from a location that shouldn't be used. This will cause Xcode to add the path to that framework in the "Framework Search Paths" in your target's properties. If you include dylibs from a non-kosher location, it will do the same for the "Library Search Paths."

The consequence of this misconfiguration is that Xcode will look in this location when trying to find all its frameworks/libraries. This will give you errors like:

missing required architecture arm in file

I was getting this error message for every single binary blob, all the way up to crt1.o To fix it, simply go to the Library Search Paths and Framework Search Paths, and delete the path to the rogue framework.

How Did Various Computers Handle The Time Change?

Windows Seven: Uneventful, clock went back one hour.

Mac OS X Snow Leopard: Uneventful, clock went back one hour.

The American Airlines Webservers:

AA.com is currently unavailable. We are working to resolve the issue as quickly as possible and apologize for any inconvenience.

The American Express Webservers:

Welcome MICHAEL HERRING , member since 2004.
Due to routine system maintenance, some Cardmembers may experience limited access to their account information at this time. We expect all information to be available by approximately 10:00am (EST) Sunday 11/1/09 and apologize for the inconvenience.

Heckuva job, webmasters.

Xenogears OCRemix Compilation Is Awesome

Not much to say. What could I say, beyond "the always-inspiring video game music remixing community OC Remix has released an incredible compilation of Xenogears music?"

Yes, that's right, the always-inspiring video game music remixing community OC Remix has released an incredible compilation of Xenogears music.

See, I told you that's all I could say. Go. Downloadenzie.

"Single-Application Mode" in OS X

When someone linked this article to me, the operative phrase "Single Application Mode" made me think someone had just figured out how to use the Mega Zoom SIMBL plugin. How wrong I was.

So apparently back in the olden days of pre-10.0 OS X, clicking a dock icon would hide all other applications. Command-Tab wouldn't, though, so using a combination of these two behaviors achieves the same functionality as Spaces, but faster and easier to modify on-the-fly. Try it yourself:

defaults write com.apple.dock single-app -bool true 
killall Dock

Viola. I have to say, I'm absolutely loving this mode. Too bad it's not exposed in System Preferences.

"Porting" iPhone Apps to XNA

I had been reading several articles posted on Gizmodo and the like about a certain iPhone game having been ported to the Zune HD (via XNA) in a mere 12 hours. Naturally, this had gotten me excited about the possible existence of a converter or abstraction layer between Apple's libraries and XNA.

Unfortunately, other articles with more detail explain that the game wasn't actually written for the iPhone. It's actually a C#.NET application, running on the iPhone with MonoTouch. This is explained in the post (from the original game dev, no less), but it's still disheartening to see popular blogs continually missing important, technical details and instead garnering page views with catchy headlines.