Month: August 2005
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The Escapist on The Games Industry
The Escapist has two great articles on the state of games in 2005. The first, Death to the Games Industry, Part I covers game development and publishing for the big guys, the AAA titles. It covers topics like the problems of dealing with publishers, the technology arms race, and cautions us about games looking and…
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Common Component Syndrome
If I never see another sortable database bound grid again, it will be too soon. This “GUI control” seems to be the favorite item of every corporate coder. It is the catch-all to creating reports, data entry screens, and general data viewers. I’m currently finishing up a project for a financial firm that involves a…
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Company Name Update
Today, I decided on a company name, acquired the domain, and filed a “Doing Business As” or DBA. I filed for the DBA through the internet firm Legal Zoom. It only cost $124 and they file everything, publish the announcement in a local paper and do a name search. Much cheaper than when I filed…
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Apple : Game Building Tools
Apple has published a writeup on game engines and tools for the Mac platform. I’ve been thinking about trying some of these out, namely Torque, Unity and PTK, but just haven’t gotten around to dedicating the time. Maybe, I should make the time; these engines look pretty powerful. The temptaion to jump onto a prebuilt…
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Game Built in One Week
I just found this interesting article where Jay Barnson of Rampant Games develops an RPG from scratch in 40 hours. Pretty cool idea and his results are quite impressive.
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Company Name Decisions
I’ve been struggling with a seemingly important decision recently: the name of my company. The problem isn’t quite as simple as just what to name a new company. Currently, I operate my software consulting and web hosting business through a Schedule-S corporation. This works much like an LLC type of company. My company has been…
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New CocoaRadio Interview with Creator of NetNewsWire
The new epsiode interviews Brent Simmons of NetNewsWire fame. For some reason, it hasn’t appeared in iTunes yet, so you need to get it directly from CocoaRadio.
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Never Surrender
Jon Jones has a good article on persistence: Smart People are Dumb, Failure is Awesome. Jones talks about succeeding simply by outlasting others. I guess it’s like the old saying, “I don’t have to out run the lion, just you”. I think this is pretty good advice.
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They Come in Threes
It’s been a crazy couple of days. Two days ago, my wife and I were cooking dinner: Baked Dill Salmon. We placed the carefully prepared fish in the oven to bake for about ten minutes. Ten minutes later, raw fish. Our twenty year old oven died. A trip to Sears and $700 later, we have…
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Drool…
Canon EOS 5D