iPhone development

Tom has been saying that we should have iPhone versions of our games to attract more crowd. I have been reluctant to take this on board since I have no clue about iPhone development. Today I got curious however, and so I downloaded the iPhone SDK (1.6GB btw, wtf??). The sheer size of the SDK was one shock and Objective-C was another shock. Are they serious? I would have to learn not just an API but a whole obscure language to throw an app together. If it was a language or a framework that I could reuse elsewhere (eg. Flash) I may give it a shot, but not this.

I am sorry to say but at this point it seems like too much of an investment. So as far as I can tell, there will be no iPhone support for some time to come. The Google phone on the other hand is a different story.

Can you smell it?

Cotopia Go is so close that I can :)

Book review - Anathem by Neal Stephenson

Unlike the book it self - I'll make this short.

The book basically sucks and I was very disappointed.

I think that most people who read 'Snow Crash' and loved it will agree with me. I got through about 80% of the book and I just couldn't be bothered to read it any more. It seems that Mr. Stephenson has gone to extreme lengths trying to convince the reader of his own cleverness. The book is full of never ending "scholarly" dialogs about nothing, most of which are not nearly as engaging as I imagine they were meant to be.

While the book is not all bad I found most of it to be dry, boring, pretentious, and lacking humor (except for one "fire/counter-fire" scene which made me laugh). I am sorry to say this as I was hoping for much and got very little.

For a longer and less blunt review check slashdot.

My Apple tech support experience

Since I've posted the rant about not buying apple products because there was no Java 1.6, Java 1.6 became available and so I bought 2 Apple notebooks this year. Unfortunately my 2008 early model MacBook got some hairline cracks in the casing so I called up Apple tech support, got a case number, and showed up at the Apple store to drop of the machine for under warranty repair. The somewhat lengthy post below describes my experience:

1. Encounter with a tool

When I made it to the genius bar (3rd floor of the Sydney George st. Apple Store) I was approached by John a concierge. He asked me re-enter all the information I already submitted over the phone (this I had to do in order to get the case number).

I did that.

Then he asked me to sign a paper stating in a nutshell that:

- I have a backup of all the data (I do)
- I have removed all the private information from the computer (I most certainly did NOT)

I refused to sign.

My notebook, like most notebooks I imagine, is full of private data. I told him that if the technicians remove the hard drive and give it to me I'll sign the form and let them work on the repair without having any privacy concerns.

Now, John refused.

John informed me that they will not remove the hard-drive nor lend me the tools to do so myself. Instead he advised me to go home, remove the hard drive myself and then come back. The other option he gracefully offered was for me to go out, buy a screw driver then come back and remove the hard drive myself right there at the Apple store. But there is no way they would do it for me or lend me the tool.

I went down to the second floor to ask at the hardware sales desk if they, by any chance, sell the tiny screw drivers needed to take out the hard drive from a MacBook. The sales guy there told me that they don't sell those since removing the hard drive voids the warranty.

Interesting.

He told me however that the "guys upstairs" would surely help me with taking out my hard drive. Given my recent experience I was in doubt so I asked him if he could help me sort that out with the "guys upstairs" to which he agreed. Back upstairs I went, and we ran into non-other than my old friend John. I explained to John that he has effectively advised me to void my warranty by telling me to remove the hard drive myself, at which point he finally caved in and hooked me up with a "Genius" called Alex.


2. Encounter with a Genius

Alex didn't need to be an actual genius to see my point. He took the notebook of my hands promised that in 15 minutes he'll be back either with the whole thing fixed up or the hard drive for me to take home. I signed the papers, on good faith that within those 15 minutes he won't break or copy my hard drive (but hey I can be reasonable), I sat down at the Genius Bar and used my MacBook Pro to write this blog. In about 45 minutes Alex came around with my MacBook fixed and good to go. Though it took him a bit longer than he estimated I would like to thank Alex for being a human with a brain and common sense (at Apple this apparently is called a "Genius") he saved me from going home buying a tool I don't need and voiding my warranty. Thank you Alex.

3. Conclusion

How would I quantify my experience tonight.

Firstly, it's obvious that it takes much more effort to encounter a tool (John) than it does t0 encounter a Genius (Alex).

Secondly, even a otherwise capable organization like Apple with it's very cool stores has it's weak links (John) and it's strong ones (Alex).

Thirdly, the paper Apple made me sign before any work was done is completely silly. I had to agree that my notebook contains no private data (which it does like any other notebook) and the 2 ways I know of to ensure no private data are:
- remove hard drive (but also void the warranty)
- reformat hard drive before submitting to apple and restore data from backup upon return (not very convenient and lenghty)

So perhaps offering to remove the hard drive and then fix the computer may be an option that is more acceptable to a customer concerned about time and privacy such as myself.

gmail feature request: show me the video

Wouldn't it be nice if we could view videos attached to emails right inside the web client? Since Google owns www.youtube.com I cannot see this being a big problem for Gmail. The UI could also make exporting videos to Youtube a single step operation. It would save me time with having to download large email attachments and with looking for codecs to play the downloaded videos (though to be fair with VLC the second point is not so much). The transcoding of videos from * to Flash may be a bit resource intensive but an organization size of Google could just be up to it.
Of course if Google doesn't step up soon, I may just decide to implement this feature myself :)

hacking cotopia

Lately we've been receiving emails about malicious players cloning other login names of other players by exploiting that we use unicode where different characters look the same (e.g. an ASCII 'C' looks like the Cyrillic 'C' for instance)
This is forcing us to restrict login names to the ASCII set.

Go vote

While I am not a US citizen I hope those of you who are will take this chance for a real change. The whole world is watching.

Cotopia GO .. on mobiles near you soon!

We've been quietly working on our next multiplayer title: Cotopia GO
I've been doing some testing lately and I must say that the game looks pretty good. We're currently checking out the latest builds on mobile phones and if all goes well we'll be in beta within a few days. We'll be then depending on the support of our community to give us constructive feedback on bugs/issues etc.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank Ondrej Michalcak for doing a great job writing this game for us - given how much we pay him he really must be doing it mostly for the love of a good challenge :)

Thank you Ondro and happy B-Day.

Darkstar plugin for NetBeans Updated

I've finally found some time on the train during my daily commute (usually spent sleeping) to implement one of the features I've had on the top of the TODO list ever since the plugin was originally published

Debugging Support

This little feature allows launching the PDS application in debug mode and then automatically attaches the NetBeans debugger.

I've realized that a better approach to the whole project may be to implement Project Darkstar Server as a platform, but I haven't been able to find a good tutorial on how to implement a custom platform. I guess I'll be taking the Java SE platform implementation as a starting point and go from there.

JDWP (wtf?) analyzer in the Open (Source)

During my years with Sun Microsystems I've worked on a number of projects. One of the responsibilities I've held was ensuring that the NetBeans debugger works well with J2ME emulators (WTK, Nokia, Sony Erisson etc.)

This was no small feat given that I've had to analyze the source of a given debugging problem, this could be:

• JDI implementation
• NetBeans debugger
• Emulator (most of the time not supplied by Sun)

and then negotiate with the responsible team(s) to fix the problem (sometimes fixing it myself and supplying a patch). This job would have been a pain if it wasn't for a small command line utility that Martin Ryzl (then my team leader, later my manager, now still someone I very much respect) wrote to monitor the JDWP traffic, when the job was his. Since the job was now mine, I took the utility and expanded it to a full blown GUI tool that can monitor JDWP packets and show detailed information about their contents and inter-relationships.

This was about 4-5 years ago, since then NetBeans including Mobility support went open source and with it most of my code, except for this last piece of work. With a blessing from Martin I am open sourcing it on java.net. It saved me a lot of time analyzing problems and hopefully it will make someone else's life easier as well.